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CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



CREATIVE 
EVOLUTION 



BY 

HENRI BERGSON 

>\ 

MEMBER OP THE INSTITUTE 
PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE 



AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY 

ARTHUR MITCHELL, Ph.D. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1911 






CoFTRIGHT, I9I I, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



J-i. 



CAMELOT PRESS, 444-46 PEARL STREET, NEW YORK 



TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 

In the writing of this English translation of Professor 
Bergson's most important work, I was helped by the friendly- 
interest of Professor William James, to whom I owe the 
illumination of much that was dark to me as well as the 
happy rendering of certain words and phrases for which 
an English equivalent was difficult to find. His sym- 
pathetic appreciation of Professor Bergson's thought is 
well known, and he has expressed his admiration for it 
in one of the chapters of A Pluralistic Universe. It was 
his intention, had he lived to see the completion of this 
translation, himself to introduce it to English readers 
in a prefatory note. 

I wish to thank my friend, Dr. George Clarke Cox, for 
many valuable suggestions. 

I have endeavored to follow the text as closely as 
possible, and at the same time to preserve the living union 
of diction and thought. Professor Bergson has himself 
carefully revised the whole work. We both of us wish 
to acknowledge the great assistance of Miss Millicent Murby. 
She has kindly studied the translation phrase by phrase, 
weighing each word, and her revision has resulted in many 
improvements. 

But above all we must express our acknowledgment 
to Mr. H. Wildon Carr, the Honorary Secretary of the 



vi CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

Aristotelian Society of London, and the writer of several 
studies of "Evolution Creatrice.'' 1 We asked him to be 
kind enough to revise the proofs of our work. He has 
done much more than revise them: they have come from 
his hands with his personal mark in many places. We 
cannot express all that the present work owes to him. 

ARTHUR MITCHELL 

Harvard University 



1 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vols. ix. and x., and Hibbert 
Journal for July, 1910. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction ix 



CHAPTER I 

The Evolution of Life — Mechanism and Teleology 

Of duration in general — Unorganized bodies and abstract time 
— Organized bodies and real duration — Individuality and 
the process of growing old ...... 1 

Of transformism and the different ways of interpreting it — Radi- 
cal mechanism and real duration: the relation of biology to 
physics and chemistry — Radical finalism and real duration: 
the relation of biology to philosophy .... 23 

The quest of a criterion — Examination of the various theories 
with regard to a particular example — Darwin and insensible 
variation — De Vries and sudden variation — Eimer and or- 
thogenesis — Neo-Lamarckism and the hereditability of 
acquired characters . . . . . . 59 

Result of the inquiry — The vital impetus .... 87 

CHAPTER II 

The Divergent Directions of the Evolution of 
Ld?e — Torpor, Intelligence, Instinct 

General idea of the evolutionary process — Growth— Divergent 
and complementary tendencies — The meaning of progress 
and of adaptation ....... 98 

The relation of the animal to the plant — General tendency of 

animal life — The development of animal life . . . 105 

The main directions of the evolution of life: torpor, intelligence, 

instinct ......... 135 

The nature of the intellect ....... 151 

The nature of instinct ....... 165 

Life and consciousness — The apparent place of man in nature . 176 

vii 



viii CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

CHAPTER III 

On the Meaning op Life — The Order op Nature 
and the Form op Intelligence 

page 

Relation of the problem of life to the problem of knowledge — 
The method of philosophy — Apparent vicious circle of the 
method proposed — Real vicious circle of the opposite 
method . ... . . . . . . 186 

Simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence — Geometry 
inherent in matter — Geometrical tendency of the intellect 
— Geometry and deduction — Geometry and induction — 
Physical laws ........ 199 

Sketch of a theory of knowledge based on the analysis of the 
idea of Disorder — Two opposed forms of order: the prob- 
lem of genera and the problem of laws — The idea of "dis- 
order" an oscillation of the intellect between the two kinds 
of order 220 

Creation and evolution — Ideal genesis of matter — The origin 
and function of life — The essential and the accidental in the 
vital process and in the evolutionary movement — Man- 
kind — The life of the body and the life of the spirit . . 236 



CHAPTER IV 

The Cinematggraphical Mechanism of Thought and the 
Mechanistic Illusion — A Glance at the History of 
Systems — Real Becoming and False Evolutionism 

Sketch of a criticism of philosophical systems, based on the 
analysis of the idea of Immutability and of the idea of 
"Nothing" — Relation of metaphysical problems to the idea 
of "Nothing" — Real meaning of this idea . . . 272 

Form and Becoming 298 

The philosophy of Forms and its conception of Becoming — 

Plato and Aristotle — The natural trend of the intellect . 304 

Becoming in modern science: two views of Time. . . 329 
The metaphysical interpretation of modern science: Descartes, 

Spinoza, Leibniz ........ 345 

The Criticism of Kant 356 

The evolutionism of Spencer 363 

INDEX 371 



INTRODUCTION 

The history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet 
is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been formed, 
by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends 
through the vertebrate series up to man. It shows us 
in the faculty of understanding an appendage of the faculty 
of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex 
and supple adaptation of the consciousness of living be- 
ings to the conditions of existence that are made for them. 
Hence should result this consequence that our intellect, 
in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the 
perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent 
the relations of external things among themselves — in 
short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the 
conclusions of the present essay. We shall see that the 
human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, 
more especially among solids, where our action finds its 
fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts 
have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic 
is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids; that, consequently, 
our intellect triumphs in geometry, wherein is revealed 
the kinship of logical thought with unorganized matter, 
and where the intellect has only to follow its natural move- 
ment, after the lightest possible contact with experience, 
in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that ex- 
perience is following behind it and will justify it invariably. 
But from this it must also follow that our thought, 
in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the 

true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary 

ix 






x CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, 
to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which 
it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the 
evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can 
it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself? As 
well contend that the part is equal to the whole, that the 
effect can reabsorb its cause, or that the pebble left on the 
beach displays the form of the wave that brought it there. 
In fact, we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of 
our thought — unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, 
intelligent finality, etc. — applies exactly to the things of 
life: who can say where individuality begins and ends, 
whether the living being is one or many, whether it is 
the cells which associate themselves into the organism 
or the organism which dissociates itself into cells? In 
vain we force the living into this or that one of our molds. 
All the molds crack. They are too narrow, above all too 
rigid, for what we try to put into them. Our reasoning, 
so sure of itself among things inert, feels ill at ease on this 
new ground. It would be difficult to cite a biological 
discovery due to pure reasoning. And most often, when 
experience has finally shown us how life goes to work to 
obtain a certain result, we find its way of working is just 
that of which we should never have thought. 

Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to extend 
to the things of life the same methods of explanation which 
have succeeded in the case of unorganized matter. It 
begins by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evo- 
lution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the 
coming and going of living beings in the narrow passage 
open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it has just 
told us, it makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a 
Sun which can illuminate the world. Boldly it proceeds, 
with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal 



INTRODUCTION xi 

reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles 
in its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees 
its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very 
speedily renounces its first ambition. "It is no longer 
reality itself," it says, "that it will reconstruct, but only 
an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image; the 
essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; 
we move among relations; the absolute is not in our prov- 
ince; we are brought to a stand before the Unknowable." — 
But for the human intellect, after too much pride, this is 
really an excess of humility. If the intellectual form of 
the living being has been gradually modeled on the recip- 
rocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their 
material environment, how should it not reveal to us some- 
thing of the very essence of which these bodies are made? 
Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born to specu- 
late or to dream, I admit, might remain outside reality, 
might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create 
it — as we create the figures of men and animals that our 
imagination cuts Out of the passing cloud. But an in- 
tellect bent upon the act to be performed and the reaction 
to follow, feeling its object so as to get its mobile impression 
at every instant, is an intellect that touches something 
of the absolute. Would the idea ever have occurred to 
us to doubt this absolute value of our knowledge if philoso- 
phy had not shown us what contradictions our speculation 
meets, what dead-locks it ends in? But these difficulties 
and contradictions all arise from trying to apply the usual 
forms of our thought to objects with which our industry 
has nothing to do, and for which, therefore, our molds 
are not made. Intellectual knowledge, in so far as it 
relates to a certain aspect of inert matter, ought, on the 
contrary, to give us a faithful imprint of it, having been 
stereotyped on this particular object. It becomes relative 



xii CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

only if it claims, such as it is, to present to us life — that is 
to say, the maker of the stereotype-plate. 

Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life? 
Must we keep to" that mechanistic idea of it which the 
understanding will always give us — an idea necessarily 
artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity 
of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which 
is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result 
or by-product of the vital process? We should have to do 
so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potential- 
ities it possesses in producing pure understandings — that 
is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of evo- 
lution that ends in man is not the only one. On other 
paths, divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have 
been developed, which have not been able to free themselves 
from external constraints or to regain control over them- 
selves, as the human intellect has done, but which, none 
the less, also express something that is immanent and 
essential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these 
other forms of consciousness brought together and amalga- 
mated with intellect: would not the result be a conscious- 
ness as wide as life? And such a consciousness, turning 
around suddenly against the push of life which it feels 
behind, would have a vision of life complete — would it 

Lnot? — even though the vision were fleeting. 
- It will be said that, even so, we do not transcend our 
intellect, for it is still with our intellect, and through our 
intellect, that we see the other forms of consciousness. 
And this would be right if we were pure intellects, if there 
did not remain, around our conceptual and logical thought, 
a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of 
which has been formed the luminous nucleus that we call 
the intellect. Therein reside certain powers that are 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

complementary to the understanding, powers of which 
we have only an indistinct feeling when we remain shut up 
in ourselves, but which will become clear and distinct 
when they perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the 
evolution of nature. They will thus learn what sort of 
effort they must make to be intensified and expanded in 
the very direction of life. 

This amounts to saying that theory of knowledge and 
theory of life seem to us inseparable. A theory of life that 
is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged 
to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the under- 
standing puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, 
willing or hot, in pre-existing frames which it regards as 
ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, 
perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct 
vision of its object. On the other hand, a theory of knowl- 
edge which does not replace the intellect in the general 
evolution of life will teach us neither how the frames of 
knowledge have been constructed nor how we can enlarge 
or go beyond them. It is necessary that these two in- 
quiries, theory of knowledge and theory of life, should 
join each other, and, by a circular process, push each other 
on unceasingly. 

Together, they may solve by a method more sure, brought 
nearer to experience, the great problems that philosophy 
poses. For, if they should succeed in their common en- 
terprise, they would show us the formation of the intellect, 
and thereby the genesis of that matter of which our in- 
tellect traces the general configuration. They would 
dig to the very root of nature and of mind. They would 
substitute for the false evolutionism of Spencer — which 
consists in cutting up present reality, already evolved, 
into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it 



xiv CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything 
that is to be explained — a true evolutionism, in which 
reality would be followed in its generation and its growth. 

But a philosophy of this kind will not be made in a 
day. Unlike the philosophical systems properly so called, 
each of which was the individual work of a man of genius 
and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or left, it will only 
be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many 
thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting 
and improving one another. So the present essay does not 
aim at resolving at once the greatest problems. It simply 
desires to define the method and to permit a glimpse, on 
some essential points, of the possibility of its application. 

Its plan is traced by the subject itself. In the first 
chapter, we try on the evolutionary progress the two 
ready-made garments that our understanding puts at our 
disposal, mechanism and finality; 1 we show that they do 
not fit, neither the one nor the other, but that one of them 
might be recut and resewn, and in this new form fit less 
badly than the other. In order to transcend the point 
of view of the understanding, we try, in our second chapter, 
to reconstruct the main lines of evolution along which life 

'The idea of regarding life as transcending teleology as well as 
mechanism is far from being a new idea. Notably in three articles by 
Ch. Dunan on"Le probleme de la vie" (Revue philosophique, 1892) it 
is profoundly treated. In the development of this idea, we agree with 
Ch. Dunan on more than one point. But the views we are presenting 
on this matter, as on the questions attaching to it, are those that we 
expressed long ago in our Essai sur les donnees imme'diates de la con- 
science (Paris, 1889). One of the principal objects of that essay was, 
in fact, to show that the psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, 
that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism 
and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," 
"spatiality/' and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: 
"real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation. In 
the present work we apply these same ideas to life in general, regarded, 
moreover, itself from the psychological point of view. 



INTRODUCTION xv 

has traveled by the side of that which has led to the human 
intellect. The intellect is thus brought back to its generat- 
ing cause, which we then have to grasp in itself and follow 
in its movement. It is an effort of this kind that we at- 
tempt — incompletely indeed — in our third chapter. A 
fourth and last part is meant to show how our understand- 
ing itself, by submitting to a certain discipline, might 
prepare a philosophy which transcends it. For that, 
a glance over the history of systems became necessary, 
together with an analysis of the two great illusions to which, 
as soon as it speculates on reality in general, the human 
understanding is exposed. 



CHAPTER I 

THE EVOLUTION OP LIFE — MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY 

The existence of which we are most assured and which 
we know best is unquestionably our own, for of every 
other object we have notions which may be considered 
extetnal and superficial, whereas, of ourselves, our per- 
ception is internal and profound. What, then, do we 
find? In this privileged case, what is the precise mean- 
ing of the word "exist"? Let us recall here briefly the 
conclusions of an earlier work. 

I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state. I 
am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do noth- 
ing, I look at what is around me or I think of something 
else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas — such are the 
changes into which my existence is divided and which 
color it in turns. I change, then, without ceasing. But 
this is not saying enough. Change is far more radical 
than we are at first inclined to suppose. 

For I speak of each of my states as if it formed a block 
and were a separate whole. I say indeed that I change, 
but the change seems to me to reside in the passage from 
one state to the next: of each state, taken separately, 
I am apt to think that it remains the same during all the 
time that it prevails. Nevertheless, a slight effort of 
attention would reveal to me that there is no feeling, no 
idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every 
moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration 



2 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

would cease to flow. Let us take the most stable of in- 
ternal states, the visual perception of a motionless external 
object. The object may remain the same, I may look at 
it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light ; 
nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that 
which I have just had, even if only because the one is an 
instant older than the other. My memory is there, which 
conveys something of the past into the present. My men- 
tal state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually 
swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes 
on increasing — rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the 
snow. Still more is this the case with states more deeply 
internal, such as sensations, feelings, desires, etc., which 
do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an 
unvarying external object. But it is expedient to dis- 
regard this uninterrupted change, and to notice it only 
.when it becomes sufficient to impress a new attitude on 
the body, a new direction on the attention. Then, and 
then only, we find that our state has changed. The 
truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the 
state itself is nothing but change. 

This amounts to saying that there is no essential differ- 
ence between passing from one state to another and per- 
sisting in the same state. If the state which "remains 
the same" is more varied than we think, on the other hand 
the passing from one state to another resembles, more than 
we imagine, a single state being prolonged; the transition 
is continuous. But, just because we close our eyes to 
the unceasing variation of every psychical state, we are 
obliged, when the change has become so considerable 
as to force itself on our attention, to speak as if a new state 
were placed alongside the previous one. Of this new state 
we assume that it remains unvarying in its turn, and so 
on endlessly. The apparent discontinuity of the psychical 



i.] DURATION 3 

life is then due to our attention being fixed on it by a 
series of separate acts: actually there is only a gentle 
slope; but in following the broken line of our acts of at- 
tention, we think we perceive separate steps. True, 
our psychic life is full of the unforeseen. A thousand 
incidents arise, which seem to be cut off from those which 
precede them, and to be disconnected from those which 
follow. Discontinuous' though they appear, however, 
in point of fact they stand out against the continuity of a 
background on which they are designed, and to which 
indeed they owe the intervals that separate them; they 
are the beats of the drum which break forth here and there 
in the symphony. Our attention fixes on them because 
they interest it more, but each of them is borne by the 
fluid mass of our whole psychical existence. Each is only 
the best illuminated point of a moving zone which com- 
prises all that we feel or think or will — all, in short, that 
we are at any given moment. It is this entire zone which 
in reality makes up our state. Now, states thus defined 
cannot be regarded as distinct elements. They continue 
each other in an endless flow. 

But, as our attention has distinguished and separated 
them artificially, it is obliged next to reunite them by 
an artificial bond. It imagines, therefore, a formless 
ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads 
the psychic states which it has set up as independent 
entities. Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging 
into each other, it perceives distinct and, so to speak, 
solid colors, set side by side like the beads of a necklace; 
it must perforce then suppose a thread, also itself solid, 
to hold the beads together. But if this colorless sub- 
stratum is perpetually colored by that which covers it, 
it is for us, in its indeterminateness, as if it did not exist, 
since we only perceive what is colored, or, in other words, 



4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

psychic states. As a matter of fact, this substratum has 
no reality; it is merely a symbol intended to recall un- 
ceasingly to our consciousness the artificial character of 
the process by which the attention places clean-cut states 
side by side, where actually there is a continuity which 
unfolds. If our existence were composed of separate 
states with an impassive ego to unite them, for us there 
would be no duration. For an ego which does not change 
does not endure, and a psychic state which remains the 
same so long as it is not replaced by the following state 
does not endure either. Vain, therefore, is the attempt 
to range such states beside each other on the ego supposed 
to sustain them: never can these solids strung upon a solid 
make up that duration which flows. What we actually 
obtain in this way is an artificial imitation of the internal 
life, a static equivalent which will lend itself better to the 
requirements of logic and language, just because we have 
eliminated from it the element of real time. But, as regards 
the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which 
conceal it, we readily perceive that time is just the stuff 
it is made of. 

There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more 
substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant 
replacing another; if it were, there would never be any- 
thing but the present — no prolonging of the past into the 
actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration 
is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into 
the future and which swells as it advances. And as the 
past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to 
its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove, 1 
is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, 
or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, 
no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, 

» Matiere el mimoire, Paris, 1896, chaps, ii. and iii. 



M DURATION 5 

for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it 
can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on 
without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by 
itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows 
us at every instant ; all that we have felt, thought and 
willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the 
present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals 
of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The 
cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into 
the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit 
beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on 
the present situation or further the action now being pre- 
pared — in short, only that which can give useful work. 
At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed 
in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. 
These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind 
us of what we are dragging behind us unawares. But, 
even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel 
vaguely that our past remains present to us. What are 
we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation 
of the history that we have lived from our birth — nay, 
even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal 
dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small 
part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including 
the original bent of our soul, that we desire, wi T l and act. 
Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its 
impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a 
small part of it only is known in the form of idea. 

From this survival of the past it follows that conscious- 
ness cannot go through the same state twice. The cir- 
cumstances may still be the same, but they will act no 
longer on the same person, since they find him at a new 
moment of his history. Our personality, which is being 
built up each instant with its accumulated experience, 



6 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any 
state, although superficially identical with another, from 
ever repeating it in its very depth. That is why our 
duration is irreversible. We could not live over again 
a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing 
the memory of all that had followed. Even could we erase 
this memory from our intellect, we could not from our will. 

Thus our personality shoots, grows and ripens with- 
out ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added 
to what was before. We may go further: it is not only 
something new, but something unforeseeable. Doubt- 
less, my present state is explained by what was in me and 
by what was acting on me a moment ago. In analyzing 
it I should find no other elements. But even a superhuman 
intelligence would not have been able to foresee the simple 
indivisible form which gives to these purely abstract 
elements their concrete organization. For to foresee con- 
sists of projecting into the future what has been perceived 
in the past, or of imagining for a later time a new group- 
ing, in a new order, of elements already perceived. But 
that which has never been perceived, and which is at the 
same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable. Now such 
is the case with each of our states, regarded as a moment 
in a history that is gradually unfolding: it is simple, and 
it cannot have been already perceived, since it concen- 
trates in its indivisibility all that has been perceived and 
what the present is adding to it besides. It is an original 
moment of a no less original history. 

The finished portrait is explained by the features of 
the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colors spread 
out on the palette ; but, even with the knowledge of what 
explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have fore- 
seen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict 
it would have been to produce it before it was produced — 



i.] DURATION 7 

an absurd hypothesis which is its own refutation. Even 
so with regard to the moments of our life, of which we are 
the artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. And 
just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed — 
in any case, is modified — under the very influence of the 
works he produces, so each of our states, at the moment 
of its issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new 
form that we are just assuming. It is then right to say 
that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary 
to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, 
and that we are creating ourselves continually. This 
creation of self by self is the more complete, the more one 
reasons on what one does. For reason does not proceed 
in such matters as in geometry, where impersonal premisses 
are given once for all, and an impersonal conclusion must 
perforce be drawn. Here, on the contrary, the same 
reasons may dictate to different persons, or to the same 
person at different moments, acts profoundly different, 
although equally reasonable. The truth is that they 
are not quite the same reasons, since they are not those 
of the same person, nor of the same moment. That is 
why we cannot deal with them in the abstract, from out- 
side, as in geometry, nor solve for another the problems 
by which he is faced in life. Each must solve them from 
within, on his own account. But we need not go more 
deeply into this. We are seeking only the precise meaning 
that our consciousness gives to this word "exist," and we 
find that, for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to 
change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself 
endlessly. Should the same be said of existence in general? 

A material object, of whatever kind, presents opposite 
characters to those which we have just been describing. 
Either it remains as it is, or else, if it changes under the 



8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

influence of an external force, our idea of this change is 
that of a displacement of parts which themselves do not 
change. If these parts took to changing, we should split 
them up in their turn. We should thus descend to the 
molecules of which the fragments are made, to the atoms 
that make up the molecules, to the corpuscles that generate 
the atoms, to the "imponderable" within which the 
corpuscle is perhaps a mere vortex. In short, we should 
push the division or analysis as far as necessary. But we 
should stop only before the unchangeable. 

Now, we say that a composite object changes by the 
displacement of its parts. But when a part has left its 
position, there is nothing to prevent its return to it. A 
group of elements which has gone through a state can 
therefore always find its way back to that state, if not by 
itself, at least by means of an external cause able to restore 
everything to its place. This amounts to saying that any 
state of the group may be repeated as often as desired, 
and consequently that the group does not grow old. It 
has no history. 

Thus nothing is created therein, neither form nor matter. 
What the group will be is already present in what it is, 
provided "what it is" includes all the points of the uni- 
verse with which it is related. A superhuman intellect 
could calculate, for any moment of time, the position of 
any point of the system in space. And as there is nothing 
more in the form of the whole than the arrangement of 
its parts, the future forms of the system are theoretically 
visible in its present configuration. 

AH our belief in objects, all our operations on the systems 
that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea that time does 
not bite into them. We have touched on this question 
in an earlier work, and shall return to it in the course of 
the present study. For the moment, we will confine our- 



i,] UNORGANIZED BODIES 9 

selves to pointing out that the abstract time t attributed 
by science to a material object or to an isolated system 
consists only in a certain number of simultaneities or more 
generally of correspondences, and that this number re- 
mains the same, whatever be the nature of the intervals 
between the correspondences. With these intervals we 
are never concerned when dealing with inert matter; or, 
if they are considered, it is in order to count therein fresh 
correspondences, between which again we shall not care 
what happens. Common sense, which is occupied with 
detached objects, and also science, which considers isolated 
systems, are concerned only with the ends of the intervals 
and not with the intervals themselves. Therefore the flow 
of time might assume an infinite rapidity, the entire past, 
present, and future of material objects or of isolated 
systems might be spread out all at once in space, without 
there being anything to change either in the formulae 
of the scientist or even in the language of common sense. 
The number t would always stand for the same thing; it 
would still count the same number of correspondences 
between the states of the objects or systems and the points 
of the line, ready drawn, which would be then the "course 
of time. " 

Yet succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material 
world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems majr 
imply that their history, past, present, and future, might 
be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in 
point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied 
a duration like our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar 
and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts. 
This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I 
have to wait is not that mathematical time which would 
apply equally well to the entire history of the material 
world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously 



10 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, 
with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot 
protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something 
thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, 
it is an absolute. What else can this mean than that the 
glass of water, the sugar, and the process of the sugar's 
melting in the water are abstractions, and that the Whole 
within which they have been cut out by my senses and un- 
derstanding progresses, it may be in the manner of a 
consciousness? 

Certainly, the operation by which science isolates and 
closes a system is not altogether artificial. If it had no 
objective foundation, we could not explain why it is clearly 
indicated in some cases and impossible in others. We 
shall see that matter has a tendency to constitute isolable 
systems, that can be treated geometrically. In fact, we 
shall define matter by just this tendency. But it is only 
a tendency. Matter does not go to the end, and the 
isolation is never complete. If science does go to the 
end and isolate completely, it is for convenience of study; 
it is understood that the so-called isolated system remains 
subject to certain external influences. Science merely 
leaves these alone, either because it finds them slight 
enough to be negligible, or because it intends to take them 
into account later on. It is none the less true that these 
influences are so many threads which bind up the system 
to another more extensive, and to this a third which in- 
cludes both, and so on to the system most objectively 
isolated and most independent of all, the solar system com- 
plete. But, even here, the isolation is not absolute. Our 
sun radiates heat and light beyond the farthest planet. 
And, on the other hand, it moves in a certain fixed direction, 
drawing with it the planets and their satellites. The 
thread attaching it to the rest of the universe is doubtless 



i.l UNORGANIZED BODIES 11 

very tenuous. Nevertheless it is along this thread that 
is transmitted down to the smallest particle of the world 
in which we live the duration immanent to the whole 
of the universe. 

The universe endures. The more we study the nature 
of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means 
invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration 
of the absolutely new. The systems marked off by science 
endure only because they are bound up inseparably with 
the rest of the universe. It is true that in the universe 
itself two opposite movements are to be distinguished, 
as we shall see later on, "descent" and "ascent." The 
first only unwinds a roll ready prepared. In principle, 
it might be accomplished almost instantaneously, like 
releasing a spring. But the ascending movement, which 
corresponds to an inner work of ripening or creating, 
endures essentially, and imposes its rhythm on the first, 
which is inseparable from it. 

There is no reason, therefore, why a duration, and so a 
form of existence like our own, should not be attributed 
to the systems that science isolates, provided such sys- 
tems are reintegrated into the Whole. But they must 
be so reintegrated. The same is even more obviously 
true of the objects cut out by our perception. The dis- 
tinct outlines which we see in an object, and which give 
it its individuality, are only the design of a certain kind 
of influence that we might exert on a certain point of space : 
it is the plan of our eventual actions that is sent back to 
our eyes, as though by a mirror, when we see the surfaces 
and edges of things. Suppress this action, and with it 
consequently those main directions which by perception 
are traced out for it in the entanglement of the real, and 
the individuality of the body is re-absorbed in the universal 
interaction which, without doubt, is reality itself. 



12 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

Now, we have considered material objects generally. 
Are there not some objects privileged? The bodies we 
perceive are, so to speak, cut out of the stuff of nature 
by our perception, and the scissors follow, in some way, 
the marking of lines along which action might be taken. 
But the body which is to perform this action, the body 
which marks out upon matter the design of its eventual 
actions even before they are actual, the body that has 
only to point its sensory organs on the flow of the real 
in order to make that flow crystallize into definite forms 
and thus to create all the other bodies — in short, the living 
body — is this a body as others are? 

Doubtless it, also, consists in a portion of extension 
bound up with the rest of extension, an intimate part of 
the Whole, subject to the same physical and chemical 
laws that govern any and every portion of matter. But, 
while the subdivision of matter into separate bodies is 
relative to our perception, while the building up of closed- 
off systems of material points is relative to our science, 
the living body has been separated and closed off by nature 
herself. It is composed of unlike parts that complete 
each other. It performs diverse functions that involve 
each other. It is an individual, and of no other object, 
not even of the crystal, can this be said, for a crystal has 
neither difference of parts nor diversity of functions. 
No doubt, it is hard to decide, even in the organized world, 
what is individual and what is not. The difficulty is 
great, even in the animal kingdom ; with plants it is almost 
insurmountable. This difficulty is, moreover, due to 
profound causes, on which we shall dwell later. We shall 
see that individuality admits of any number of degrees, 
and that it is not fully realized anywhere, even in man. 
But that is no reason for thinking it is not a character- 
istic property of life. The biologist who proceeds as a 



i] ORGANIZED BODIES 13 

geometrician is too ready to take advantage here of our 
inability to give a precise and general definition of in- 
dividuality. A perfect definition applies only to a com- 
pleted reality; now, vital properties are never entirely 
realized, though always on the way to become so; they 
are not so much states as tendencies. And a tendency 
achieves all that it aims at only if it is not thwarted by 
another tendency. How, then, could this occur in the 
domain of life, where, as we shall show, the interaction 
of antagonistic tendencies is always implied? In particu- 
lar, it may be said of individuality that, while the ten- 
dency to individuate is everywhere present in the organized 
world, it is everywhere opposed by the tendency towards 
reproduction. For the individuality to be perfect, it 
would be necessary that no detached part of the organism 
could live separately. But then reproduction would be 
impossible. For what is reproduction, but the building 
up of a new organism with a detached fragment of the old? 
Individuality therefore harbors its enemy at home. Its 
very need of perpetuating itself in time condemns it never 
to be complete in space. The biologist must take due 
account of both tendencies in every instance, and it is 
therefore useless to ask him for a definition of individuality 
that shall fit all cases and work automatically. 

But too often one reasons about the things of life in 
the same way as about the conditions of crude matter. 
Nowhere is the confusion so evident as in discussions about 
individuality. We are shown the stumps of a Lum- 
briculus, each regenerating its head and living thence- 
forward as an independent individual; a hydra whose 
pieces become so many fresh hydras; a sea-urchin's egg 
whose fragments develop complete embryos: where then, 
we are asked, was the individuality of the egg, the hydra, 
the worm? — But, because there are several individuals 



14 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

now, it does not follow that there was not a single in- 
dividual just before. No doubt, when I have seen several 
drawers fall from a chest, I have no longer the right to 
say that the article was all of one piece. But the fact is 
that there can be nothing more in the present of the chest 
of drawers than there was in its past, and if it is made up 
of several different pieces now, it was so from the date of 
its manufacture. Generally speaking, unorganized bodies, 
which are what we have need of in order that we may act, 
and on which we have modelled our fashion of thinking, 
are regulated by this simple law: the present contains noth- 
ing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was 
already in the cause. But suppose that the distinctive 
feature of the organized body is that it grows and changes 
without ceasing, as indeed the most superficial observation 
testifies, there would be nothing astonishing in the fact 
that it was one in the first instance, and afterwards many. 
The reproduction of unicellular organisms consists in 
just this — the living being divides into two halves, of which 
each is a complete individual. True, in the more complex 
animals, nature localizes in the almost independent sexual 
cells the power of producing the whole anew. But some- 
thing of this power may remain diffused in the rest of the 
organism, as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is 
conceivable that in certain privileged cases the faculty 
may persist integrally in a latent condition and manifest 
itself on the first opportunity. In truth, that I may have 
the right to speak of individuality, it is not necessary that 
the organism should be without the power to divide into 
fragments that are able to live. It is sufficient that it 
should have presented a certain systematization of parts 
before the division, and that the same systematization 
tend to be reproduced in each separate portion afterwards. 
Now, that is precisely what we observe in the organic 



i.j ORGANIZED BODIES 15 

world. We may conclude, then, that individuality is 
never perfect, and that it is often difficult, sometimes 
impossible, to tell what is an individual, and what is not, 
but that life nevertheless manifests a search for indi- 
viduality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally 
isolated, naturally closed. 

By this is a living being distinguished from all that 
our perception or our science isolates or closes artifici- 
ally. It would therefore be wrong to compare it to an 
object. Should we wish to find a term of comparison in 
the inorganic world, it is not to a determinate material 
object, but much rather to the totality of the material 
universe that we ought to compare the living organism. 
It is true that the comparison would not be worth much, 
for a living being is observable, whilst the whole of the 
universe is constructed or reconstructed by thought. But 
at least our attention would thus have been called to the 
essential character of organization. Like the universe as a 
whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the 
organism which lives is a thing that endures. Its past, 
in its entirety, is prolonged into its present, and abides 
there, actual and acting. How otherwise could we under- 
stand that it passes through distinct and well-marked 
phases, that it changes its age — in short, that it has a 
history? If I consider my body in particular, I find that, 
like my consciousness, it matures little by little from infancy 
to old age; like myself, it grows old. Indeed, maturity 
and old age are, properly speaking, attributes only of my 
body; it is only metaphorically that I apply the same names 
to the corresponding changes of my conscious self. Now, 
if I pass from the top to the bottom of the scale of living 
beings, from one of the most to one of the least differentia- 
ted, from the multicellular organism of man to the unicellu- 



16 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap 

lar organism of the Infusorian, I find, even in this simple 
cell, the same process of growing old. The Infusorian 
is exhausted at the end of a certain number of divisions, 
and though it may be possible, by modifying the environ- 
ment, to put off the moment when a rejuvenation by con- 
jugation becomes necessary, this cannot be indefinitely 
postponed. 1 It is true that between these two extreme 
cases, in which the organism is completely individualized, 
there might be found a multitude of others in which the 
individuality is less well marked, and in which, although 
there is doubtless an ageing somewhere, one cannot say 
exactly what it is that grows old. Once more, there is no 
universal biological law which applies precisely and auto- 
matically to every living thing. There are only directions 
in which life throws out species in general. Each particular 
species, in the very act by which it is constituted, affirms 
its independence, follows its caprice, deviates more or 
less from the straight line, sometimes even remounts the 
slope and seems to turn its back on its original direction. 
It is easy enough to argue that a tree never grows old, 
since the tips of its branches are always equally young, 
always equally capable of engendering new trees by budding. 
But in such an organism — which is, after all, a society 
rather than an individual — something ages, if only the 
leaves and the interior of the trunk. And each cell, con- 
sidered separately, evolves in a specific way. Wherever 
anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which 
time is being inscribed. 

This, it will be said, is only a metaphor. — It is of the 
very essence of mechanism, in fact, to consider as meta- 
phorical every expression which attributes to time an 
effective action and a reality of its own. In vain does 

1 Calkins, Studies on the Life History of ProM^p (Archiv f, Entwick- 
lungsmechanik, vol. xv., 1903, pp. 139-186). 



i.j INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 17 

immediate experience show us that the very basis of our 
conscious existence is memory, that is to say, the pro- 
longation of the past into the present, or, in a word, dura- 
tion, acting and irreversible. In vain does reason prove 
to us that the more we get away from the objects cut out 
and the systems isolated by common sense and by science 
and the deeper we dig beneath them, the more we have 
to do with a reality which changes as a whole in its in- 
most states, as if an accumulative memory of the past 
made it impossible to go back again. The mechanistic 
instinct of the mind is stronger than reason, stronger than 
immediate experience. The metaphysician that we each 
carry unconsciously within us, and the presence of which 
is explained, as we shall see later on, by the very place that 
man occupies amongst the living beings, has its fixed re- 
quirements, its ready-made explanations, its irreducible 
propositions: all unite in denying concrete duration. 
Change must be reducible to an arrangement or rearrange- 
ment of parts; the irreversibility of time must be an ap- 
pearance relative to our ignorance; the impossibility of 
turning back must be only the inability of man to put 
things in place again. So growing old can be nothing more 
than the gradual gain or loss of certain substances, per- 
haps both together. Time is assumed to have just as 
much reality for a living being as for an hour-glass, in 
which the top part empties while the lower fills, and all goes 
where it was before when you turn the glass upside down. 
True, biologists are not agreed on what is gained and 
what is lost between the day of birth and the day of death. 
There are those who hold to the continual growth in the 
volume of protoplasm from the birth of the cell right on 
to its death. 1 More probable and more profound is the 

1 Sedgwick Minot, On Certain Phenomena of Growing Old (Proc. Amer. 
Assoc, for the Advancement of Science, 39th Meeting, Salem, 1891, pp. 
271-288). 



18 CREATIVE EVOLUTION rcHAP. 

theory according to which the diminution bears on the 
quantity of nutritive substance contained in that "inner 
environment" in which the organism is being renewed, 
and the increase on the quantity of unexcreted residual 
substances which, accumulating in the body, finally "crust 
it over." 1 Must we however — with an eminent bacteri- 
ologist — declare any explanation of growing old insufficient 
that does not take account of phagocytosis? 2 We do not 
feel qualified to settle the question. But the fact that the 
two theories agree in affirming the constant accumulation 
or loss of a certain kind of matter, even though they have 
little in common as to what is gained and lost, shows pretty 
well that the frame of the explanation has been furnished 
a 'priori. We shall see this more and more as we proceed 
with our study: it is not easy, in thinking of time, to escape 
the image of the hour-glass. 

The cause of growing old must lie deeper. We hold 
that there is unbroken continuity between the evolution 
of the embryo and that of the complete organism. The 
impetus which causes a living being to grow larger, to 
develop and to age, is the same that has caused it to pass 
through the phases of the embryonic life. The develop- 
ment of the embryo is a perpetual change of form. Any 
one who attempts to note all its successive aspects becomes 
lost in an infinity, as is inevitable in dealing with a con- 
tinuum. Life does but prolong this prenatal evolution. 
The proof of this is that it is often impossible for us to say 
whether we are dealing with an organism growing old or 
with an embryo continuing to evolve; such is the case, 

1 Le Dantec, L'Individualite et I'erreur individualiste, Paris, 1905, 
pp. 84 ff. 

2 Metchnikoff, La Degenerescence sinile (Annie biologique, iii., 1897, 
pp. 249 ff.). Gf. by the same author, La Nature humaine, Paris, 1903, 
pp. 312 ff. 



i.i INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 19 

for example, with the larvae of insects and Crustacea. 
On the other hand, in an organism such as our own, crises 
like puberty or the menopause, in which the individual 
is completely transformed, are quite comparable to changes 
in the course of larval or embryonic life — yet they are part 
and parcel of the process of our aging. Although they occur 
at a definite age and within a time that may be quite short, 
no one would maintain that they appear then ex abrupto, 
from without, simply because a certain age is reached, just 
as a legal right is granted to us on our one-and-twentieth 
birthday. It is evident that a change like that of puberty 
is in course of preparation at every instant from birth, 
and even before birth, and that the aging up to that crisis 
consists, in part at least, of this gradual preparation. 
In short, what is properly vital in growing old is the in- 
sensible, infinitely graduated, continuance of the change 
of form. Now, this change is undoubtedly accompanied 
by phenomena of organic destruction: to these, and to 
these alone, will a mechanistic explanation of aging be 
confined. It will note the facts of sclerosis, the gradual 
accumulation of residual substances, the growing hyper- 
trophy of the protoplasm of the cell. But under these 
visible effects an inner cause lies hidden. The evolution 
of the living being, like that of the embryo, implies a con- 
tinual recording of duration, a persistence of the past in 
the present, and so an appearance, at least, of organic 
memory. 

The present state of an unorganized body depends ex- 
clusively on what happened at the previous instant; and 
likewise the position of the material points of a system 
defined and isolated by science is determined by the po- 
sition of these same points at the moment immediately 
before. In other words, the laws that govern unorganized 
matter are expressible, in principle, by differential equations 



20 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in which time (in the sense in which the mathematician 
takes this word) would play the role of independent variable. 
Is it so with the laws of life? Does the state of a living 
body find its complete explanation in the state immediately 
before? Yes, if it is agreed a priori to liken the living body 
to other bodies, and to identify it, for the sake of the argu- 
ment, with the artificial systems on which the chemist, 
physicist, and astronomer operate. But in astronomy, 
physics, and chemistry the proposition has a perfectly 
definite meaning: it signifies that certain aspects of the 
present, important for science, are calculable as functions 
of the immediate past. Nothing of the sort in the domain 
of life. Here calculation touches, at most, certain phe- 
nomena of organic destruction. Organic creation, on the 
contrary, the evolutionary phenomena which properly 
constitute life, we cannot in any way subject to a mathe- 
matical treatment. It will be said that this impotence 
is due only to our ignorance. But it may equally well 
express the fact that the present moment of a living body 

I does not find its explanation in the moment immediately 
before, that all the past of the organism must be added to 

y that moment, its heredity — in fact, the whole of a very 
long history. In the second of these two hypotheses, 
not in the first, is really expressed the present state of 
the biological sciences, as well as their direction. As for 
the idea that the living body might be treated by some 
superhuman calculator in the same mathematical way as 
our solar system, this has gradually arisen from a meta- 
physic which has taken a more precise form since the 
physical discoveries of Galileo, but which, as we shall 
show, was always the natural metaphysic of the human 
mind. Its apparent clearness, our impatient desire to 
find it true, the enthusiasm with wnich so many excellent 
minds accept it without proof — all the seductions, in short, 



ij INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 21 

that it exercises on our thought, should put us on our 
guard against it. The attraction it has for us proves well 
enough that it gives satisfaction to an innate inclination. 
But, as will be seen further on, the intellectual tendencies 
innate to-day, which life must have created in the course 
of its evolution, are not at all meant to supply us with 
an explanation of life: they have something else to do. 

Any attempt to distinguish between an artificial and a 
natural system, between the dead and the living, runs 
counter to this tendency at once. Thus it happens that 
we find it equally difficult to imagine that the organized 
has duration and that the unorganized has not. When 
we say that the state of an artificial system depends ex- 
clusively on its state at the moment before, does it not 
seem as if we were bringing time in, as if the system had 
something to do with real duration? And, on the other 
hand, though the whole of the past goes into the making 
of the living being's present moment, does not organic 
memory press it into the moment immediately before the 
present, so that the moment immediately before becomes 
the sole cause of the present one? — To speak thus is to 
ignore the cardinal difference between concrete time, along 
which a real system develops, and that abstract time which 
enters into our speculations on artificial systems. What 
does it mean, to say that the state of an artificial system 
depends on what it was at the moment immediately before? 
There is no instant immediately before another instant; 
there could not be, any more than there could be one 
mathematical point touching another. The instant "im- 
mediately before" is, in reality, that which is connected 
with the present instant by the interval dt. All that you 
mean to say, therefore, is that the present state of the 
system is defined by equations into which differential 
coefficients enter, such as ds\dt, dv\dt, that is to say, at 



22 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

bottom, present velocities and present accelerations. You 
are therefore really speaking only of the present — a present, 
it is true, considered along with its tendency. The systems 
science works with are, in fact, in an instantaneous present 
that is always being renewed; such systems are never in 
that real, concrete duration in which the past remains 
bound up with the present. When the mathematician 
calculates the future state of a system at the end of a time 
t, there is nothing to prevent him from supposing that the 
universe vanishes from this moment till that, and suddenly 
reappears. It is the t-th. moment only that counts — 
and that will be a mere instant. What will flow on in 
the interval — that is to say, real time — does not count, 
and cannot enter into the calculation. If the mathe- 
matician says that he puts himself inside this interval, 
he means that he is placing himself at a certain point, 
at a particular moment, therefore at the extremity again 
of a certain time t'; with the interval up to T' he is not 
concerned. If he divides the interval into infinitely small 
parts by considering the differential dt, he thereby expresses 
merely the fact that he will consider accelerations and 
velocities — that is to say, numbers which denote ten- 
dencies and enable him to calculate the state of the system 
at a given moment. But he is always speaking of a given 
moment — a static moment, that is — and not of flowing 
time. In short, the world the mathematician deals with is 
a world that dies and is reborn at every instant — the world 
which Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued 
creation. But, in time thus conceived, how could evolution, 
which is the very essence of life, ever take place? Evo- 
lution implies a real persistence of the past in the present, 
a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a connecting 
link. In other words, to know a living being or natural 
system is to get at the very interval of duration, while 



i.] INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 23 

the knowledge of an artificial or mathematical system applies 
only to the extremity. 

Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the 
present, real duration — the living being seems, then, to 
share these attributes with consciousness. Can we go 
further and say that life, like conscious activity, is in- 
vention, is unceasing creation? 

It does not enter into our plan to set down here the 
proofs of transformism. We wish only to explain in a 
word or two why we shall accept it, in the present work, 
as a sufficiently exact and precise expression of the facts 
actually known. The idea of transformism is already 
in germ in the natural classification of organized beings. 
The naturalist, in fact, brings together the organisms that 
are like each other, then divides the group into sub-groups 
within which the likeness is still greater, and so on: all 
through the operation, the characters of the group appear 
as general themes on which each of the sub-groups per- 
forms its particular variation. Now, such is just the re- 
lation we find, in the animal and in the vegetable world 
between the generator and the generated: on the canva^ 
which the ancestor passes on, and which his descendants 
possess in common, each puts his own original embroidery. 
True, the differences between the descendant and the 
ancestor are slight, and it may be asked whether the same 
living matter presents enough plasticity to take in turn 
such different forms as those of a fish, a reptile and a bird. 
But, to this question, observation gives a peremptory 
answer. It shows that up to a certain period in its de- 
velopment the embryo of the bird is hardly distinguishable 
from that of the reptile, and that the individual develops, 
throughout the embryonic life in general, a series of trans- 
formations comparable to those through which, according 



24 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to the theory of evolution, one species passes into another. 
A single cell, the result of the combination of two cells, 
male and female, accomplishes this work by dividing. 
Every day, before our eyes, the highest forms of life are 
springing from a very elementary form. Experience, 
then, shows that the most complex has been able to issue 
from the most simple by way of evolution. Now, has it 
arisen so, as a matter of fact? Paleontology, in spite 
of the insufficiency of its evidence, invites us to believe 
it has; for, where it makes out the order of succession of 
species with any precision, this order is just what con- 
siderations drawn from embryogeny and comparative 
anatomy would lead any one to suppose, and each new 
paleontological discovery brings transformism a new 
confirmation. Thus, the proof drawn from mere ob- 
servation is ever being strengthened, while, on the other 
hand, experiment is removing the objections one by one. 
The recent experiments of H. de Vries, for instance, by 
showing that important variations can be produced sud- 
denly and transmitted regularly, have overthrown some of 
the greatest difficulties raised by the theory. They have 
enabled us greatly to shorten the time biological evolution 
seems to demand. They also render us less exacting 
toward paleontology. So that, all things considered, the 
transformist hypothesis looks more and more like a close 
approximation to the truth. It is not rigorously de- 
monstrable; but, failing the certainty of theoretical or 
experimental demonstration, there is a probability which 
is continually growing, due to evidence which, while com- 
ing short of direct proof, seems to point persistently in its 
direction: such is the kind of probability that the theory 
of transformism offers. 

Let us admit, however, that transformism may be 
wrong. Let us suppose that species are proved, by in- 



i.] TRANSFORMISM 25 

ference or by experiment, to have arisen by a discontinuous 
process, of which to-day we have no idea. Would the 
doctrine be affected in so far as it has a special interest 
or importance for us? Classification would probably 
remain, in its broad lines. The actual data of embryology 
would also remain. The correspondence between com- 
parative embryogeny and comparative anatomy would 
remain too. Therefore biology could and would continue 
to establish between living forms the same relations and 
the same kinship as transformism supposes to-day. It 
would be, it is true, an ideal kinship, and no longer a 
material affiliation. But, as the actual data of paleontology 
would also remain, we should still have to admit that it is 
successively, not simultaneously, that the forms between 
which we find an ideal kinship have appeared. Now, the 
evolutionist theory, so far as it has any importance for 
philosophy, requires no more. It consists above all in 
establishing relations of ideal kinship, and in maintaining 
that wherever there is this relation of, so to speak, logical 
affiliation between forms, there is also a relation of chrono- 
logical succession between the species in which these forms 
are materialized. Both arguments would hold in any 
case. And hence, an evolution somewhere would still 
have to be supposed, whether in a creative Thought in 
which the ideas of the different species are generated by 
each other exactly as transformism holds that species them- 
selves are generated on the earth; or in a plan of vital organi- 
zation immanent in nature, which gradually works itself out, 
in which the relations of logical and chronological affiliation 
between pure forms are just those which transformism 
presents as relations of real affiliation between living 
individuals; or, finally, in some unknown cause of life, 
which develops its effects as if they generated one another. 
Evolution would then simply have been transposed, made 



26 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to pass from the risible to the invisible. Almost all that 
transformism tells us to-day would be preserved, open to 
interpretation in another way. Will it not, therefore, 
be better to stick to the letter of transformism as almost 
all scientists profess it? Apart from the question to what 
extent the theory of evolution describes the facts and to 
what extent it symbolizes them, there is nothing in it 
that is irreconcilable with the doctrines it has claimed to 
replace, even with that of special creations, to which it is 
usually opposed. For this reason we think the language 
of transformism forces itself now upon all philosophy, as 
the dogmatic affirmation of transformism forces itself upon 
science. 

But then, we must no longer speak of life in general 
as an abstraction, or as a mere heading under which all 
living beings are inscribed. At a certain moment, in 
certain points of space, a visible current has taken rise; 
this current of life, traversing the bodies it has organized 
one after another, passing from generation to generation, 
has become divided amongst species and distributed 
amongst individuals without losing anything of its force, 
rather intensifying in proportion to its advance. It is 
well known that, on the theory of the "continuity of the 
germ-plasm," maintained by Weismann, the sexual ele- 
ments of the generating organism pass on their properties 
directly to the sexual elements of the organism engendered. 
In this extreme form, the theory has seemed debatable, 
for it is only in exceptional cases that there are any signs 
of sexual glands at the time of segmentation of the ferti- 
lized egg. But, though the cells that engender the sexual 
elements do not generally appear at the beginning of the 
embryonic life, it is none the less true that they are always 
formed out of those tissues of the embryo which have not 
undergone any particular functional differentiation, and 



i.l TRANSFORMISM 27 

whose cells are made of unmodified protoplasm. 1 In other 
words, the genetic power of the fertilized ovum weakens, 
the more it is spread over the growing mass of the tissues 
of the embryo; but, while it is being thus diluted, it is 
concentrating anew something of itself on a certain special 
point, to wit, the cells, from which the ova or spermatozoa 
will develop. It might therefore be said that, though 
the germ-plasm is not continuous, there is at least con- 
tinuity of genetic energy, this energy being expended only 
at certain instants, for just enough time to give the requisite 
impulsion to the embryonic life, and being recouped as 
soon as possible in new sexual elements, in which, again, 
it bides its time. Regarded from this point of view, life 
is like a current passing from germ to germ through the 
medium of a developed organism. It is as if the organism 
itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by 
the former germ endeavoring to continue itself in a new germ. 
The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely 
pursued, an invisible progress, on which each visible organ- 
ism rides during the short interval of time given it to live. 
Now, the more we fix our attention on this continuity 
of life, the more we see that organic evolution resembles 
the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses 
against the present and causes the upspringing of a new 
form of consciousness, incommensurable with its ante- 
cedents. That the appearance of a vegetable or animal 
species is due to specific causes, nobody will gainsay. But 
this can only mean that if, after the fact, we could know 
these causes in detail, we could explain by them the form 
that has been produced; foreseeing the form is out of the 
question. 2 It may perhaps be said that the form could 

1 Roule, L'Embryologie generate, Paris, 1893, p. 319. 

*The irreversibility of the series of living beings has been well set 
forth by Baldwin (Development and Evolution, New York, 1902; in 
particular p. 327). 



28 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

be foreseen if we could know, in all their details, the con- 
ditions under which it will be produced. But these con- 
ditions are built up into it and are part and parcel of its 
being; they are peculiar to that phase of its history in 
which life finds itself at the moment of producing the form : 
how could we know beforehand a situation that is unique 
of its kind, that has never yet occurred and will never occur 
again? Of the future, only that is foreseen which is like 
the past or can be made up again with elements like those 
of the past. Such is the case with astronomical, physical 
and chemical facts, with all facts which form part of a 
system in which elements supposed to be unchanging are 
merely put together, in which the only changes are changes 
of position, in which there is no theoretical absurdity in 
imagining that things are restored to their place; in which, 
consequently, the same total phenomenon, or at least the 
same elementary phenomena, can be repeated. But an 
original situation, which imparts something of its own 
originality to its elements, that is to say, to the partial 
views that are taken of it, how can such a situation be 
pictured as given before it is actually produced? 1 All that 
can be said is that, once produced, it will be explained by 
the elements that analysis will then carve out of it. Now, 
what is true of the production of a new species is also true 
of the production of a new individual, and, more generally, 
of any moment of any living form. For, though the 
variation must reach a certain importance and a certain 
generality in order to give rise to a new species, it is being 
produced every moment, continuously and insensibly, 
in every living being. And it is evident that even the sudden 
"mutations" which we now hear of are possible only if 
a process of incubation, or rather of maturing, is going 

1 We have dwelt on this point and tried to make it clear in the Essai 
sur les donnees immediates de la conscience, pp. 140-151. 



i.l BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 29 

on throughout a series of generations that do not seem to 
change. In this sense it might be said of life, as of con- 
sciousness, that at every moment it is creating something. 1 
But against this idea of the absolute originality and un- 
foreseeability of forms our whole intellect rises in revolt 
The essential function of our intellect, as the evolution 
of life has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct, 
to make ready for our action on things, to foresee, for 
a given situation, the events, favorable or unfavorable, 
which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore in- 
stinctively selects in a given situation whatever is like 
something already known; it seeks this out, in order 
that it may apply its principle that "like produces like." 
In just this does the prevision of the future by common 
sense consist. Science carries this faculty to the highest 
possible degree of exactitude and precision, but does not 
alter its essential character. Like ordinary knowledge, 
in dealing with things science is concerned only with the 
aspect of repetition. Though the whole be original, science 
will always manage to analyze it into elements or aspects 
which are approximately a reproduction of the past. 
Science can work only on what is supposed to repeat it- 
self — that is to say, on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, 
from the action of real time. Anything that is irreducible 

1 In his fine work on Genius in Art (Le Genie dans I'art), M. Seailles 
develops this twofold thesis, that art is a continuation of nature and 
that life is creation. We should willingly accept the second formula; 
but by creation must we understand, as the author does, a synthesis of 
elements? Where the elements pre-exist, the synthesis that will be 
made is virtually given, being only one of the possible arrangements. 
This arrangement a superhuman intellect could have perceived in ad- 
vance among all the possible ones that surround it. We hold, on the 
contrary, that in the domain of life the elements have no real and sepa- 
rate existence. They are manifold mental views of an indivisible 
process. And for that reason there is radical contingency in progress, 
incommensurability between what goes before and what follows — in 
short, duration. 



30 CREATIVE EVOLUTION (chap. 

and irreversible in the successive moments of a history 
eludes science. To get a notion of this irreducibility and 
irreversibility, we must break with scientific habits which 
are adapted to the fundamental requirements of thought, 
we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural 
bent of the intellect. But that is just the function of 
philosophy. 

In vain, therefore, does life evolve before our eyes as a 
continuous creation of unforeseeable form : the idea always 
persists that form, unforeseeability and continuity are 
mere appearance — the outward reflection of our own ig- 
norance. What is presented to the senses as a continuous 
history would break up, we are told, into a series of suc- 
cessive states. "What gives you the impression of an 
original state resolves, upon analysis, into elementary 
facts, each of which is the repetition of a fact already 
known. What you call an unforeseeable form is only a 
new arrangement of old elements. The elementary causes, 
which in their totality have determined this arrangement, 
are themselves old causes repeated in a new order. Know- 
ledge of the elements and of the elementary causes would 
have made it possible to foretell the living form which is 
their sum and their resultant. When we have resolved 
the biological aspect of phenomena into physico-chemical 
factors, we will leap, if necessary, over physics and chemis- 
try themselves; we will go from masses to molecules, from 
molecules to atoms, from atoms to corpuscles: we must 
indeed at last come to something that can be treated as a 
kind of solar system, astronomically. If you deny it, 
you oppose the very principle of scientific mechanism, and 
you arbitrarily affirm that living matter is not made of 
the same elements as other matter." — We reply that we 
do not question the fundamental identity of inert matter 
and organized matter. The only question is whether the 



i.i BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 31 

natural systems which we call living beings must be as- 
similated to the artificial systems that science cuts out 
within inert matter, or whether they must not rather be 
compared to that natural system which is the whole of 
the universe. That life is a kind of mechanism I cordially 
agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated 
within the whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism 
of the real whole? The real whole might well be, we con- 
ceive, an indivisible continuity. The systems we cut out 
within it would, properly speaking, not then be parts at 
all; they would be partial views of the whole. And, with 
these partial views put end to end, you will not make 
even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole, any 
more than, by multiplying photographs of an object in 
a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the object 
itself. So of life and of the physico-chemical phenomena 
to which you endeavor to reduce it. Analysis will un- 
doubtedly resolve the process of organic creation into an 
ever-growing number of physico-chemical phenomena, 
and chemists and physicists will have to do, of course, 
with nothing but these. But it does not follow that 
chemistry and physics will ever give us the key to life. 

A very small element of a curve is very near being a 
straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In 
the limit, it may be termed a part of the curve or a part 
of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points 
a curve coincides with its tangent. So likewise "vitality" 
is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical 
forces; but such points are, as a fact, only views taken 
by a mind which imagines stops at various moments 
of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, 
life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a 
curve is composed of straight lines. 

In a general way, the most radical progress a science 



32 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

can achieve is the working of the completed results into 
a new scheme of the whole, by relation to which they 
become instantaneous and motionless views taken at in- 
tervals along the continuity of a movement. Such, for 
example, is the relation of modern to ancient geometry. 
The latter, purely static, worked with figures drawn once 
for all; the former studies the varying of a function — 
that is, the continuous movement by which the figure 
is described. No doubt, for greater strictness, all con- 
siderations of motion may be eliminated from mathe- 
matical processes; but the introduction of motion into the 
genesis of figures is nevertheless the origin of modern 
mathematics. We believe that if biology could ever get 
as close to its object as mathematics does to its own, it 
would become, to the physics and chemistry of organized 
bodies, what the mathematics of the moderns has proved 
to be in relation to ancient geometry. The wholly super- 
ficial displacements of masses and molecules studied, in 
physics and chemistry would become, by relation to that 
inner vital movement (which is transformation and not 
translation) what the position of a moving object is to the 
movement of that object in space. And, so far as we can 
see, the procedure by which we should then pass from the 
definition of a certain vital action to the system of physico- 
chemical facts which it implies would be like passing from 
the function to its derivative, from the equation of the 
curve {i.e. the law of the continuous movement by which 
the curve is generated) to the equation of the tangent 
giving its instantaneous direction. Such a science would 
be a mechanics of transformation, of which our mechanics 
of translation would become a particular case, a simpli- 
fication, a projection on the plane of pure quantity. And 
just as an infinity of functions have the same differential, 
these functions differing from each other by a constant, 



i.l BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 33 

so perhaps the integration of the physico-chemical ele- 
ments of properly vital action might determine that action 
only in part — a part would be left to indetermination. 
But such an integration can be no more than dreamed of; 
we do not pretend that the dream will ever be realized. 
We are only trying, by carrying a certain comparison as 
far as possible, to show up to what point our theory goes 
along with pure mechanism, and where they part company. 

Imitation of the living by the unorganized may, how- 
ever, go a good way. Not only does chemistry make 
organic syntheses, but we have succeeded in reproducing 
artificially the external appearance of certain facts of 
organization, such as indirect cell-division and proto- 
plasmic circulation. It is well known that the protoplasm 
of the cell effects various movements within its envelope; 
on the other hand, indirect cell-division is the outcome 
of very complex operations, some involving the nucleus 
and others the cytoplasm. These latter commence by 
the doubling of the centrosome, a small spherical body 
alongside the nucleus. The two centrosomes thus ob- 
tained draw apart, attract the broken and doubled ends 
of the filament of which the original nucleus mainly con- 
sisted, and join them to form two fresh nuclei about which 
the two new cells are constructed which will succeed the 
first. Now, in their broad lines and in their external 
appearance, some at least of these operations have been 
successfully imitated. If some sugar or table salt is 
pulverized and some very old oil is added, and a drop of 
the mixture is observed under the microscope, a froth of 
alveolar structure is seen whose configuration is like that 
of protoplasm, according to certain theories, and in which 
movements take place which are decidedly like those of 
protoplasmic circulation. 1 If, in a froth of the same kind, 

1 Butschli, Untersuchungen uber mikroskopische Schaume und das Pro- 
toplasma, Leipzig, 1892, First Part. 



34 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

the air is extracted from an alveolus, a cone of attraction 
is seen to form, like those about the centrosomes which 
result in the division of the nucleus. 1 Even the external 
motions of a unicellular organism — of an amoeba, at any 
rate — are sometimes explained mechanically. The dis- 
placements of an amoeba in a drop of water would be 
comparable to the motion to and fro of a grain of dust 
in a draughty room. Its mass is all the time absorbing 
certain soluble matters contained in the surrounding 
water, and giving back to it certain others; these con- 
tinual exchanges, like those between two vessels separated 
by a porous partition, would create an everchanging 
vortex around the little organism. As for the temporary 
prolongations or pseudopodia which the amoeba seems 
to make, they would be not so much given out by it as 
attracted from it by a kind of inhalation or suction of the 
surrounding medium.* In the same way we may perhaps 
come to explain the more complex movements which the 
Infusorian makes with its vibratory cilia, which, more- 
over, are probably only fixed pseudopodia. 

But scientists are far from agreed on the value of ex- 
planations and schemas of this sort. Chemists have 
pointed out that even in the organic — not to go so far as 
the organized — science has reconstructed hitherto nothing 
but waste products of vital activity; the peculiarly active 
plastic substances obstinately defy synthesis. One of 
the most notable naturalists of our time has insisted on 
the opposition of two orders of phenomena observed in 
living tissues, anagenesis and katagenesis. The role of 
the anagenetic energies is to raise the inferior energies 

1 Rhumbler, Versuch einer mechanischen Erklarung der indirekten 
Zell- und Kernteilung (JRoux's Archiv, 1896). 

2 Berthold, Studien iiber Protoplasmamechanik, Leipzig, 1886, p. 102. 
Cf. the explanation proposed by Le Dantec, Theorie nouvelle de la vie, 
Paris, 1896, p. 60. 



i.l BIOLOGY, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY 35 

to their own level by assimilating inorganic substances. 
They construct the tissues. On the other hand, the actual 
functioning of life (excepting, of course, assimilation, 
growth, and reproduction) is of the katagenetic order, 
exhibiting the fall, not the rise, of energy. It is only with 
these facts of katagenetic order that physico-chemistry 
deals — that is, in short, with the dead and not with the 
living. 1 The other kind of facts certainly seem to defy 
physico-chemical analysis, even if they are not anagenetic 
in the proper sense of the word. As for the artificial 
imitation of the outward appearance of protoplasm, should 
a real theoretic importance be attached to this when the 
question of the physical framework of protoplasm is not 
yet settled? We are still further from compounding pro- 
toplasm chemically. Finally, a physico-chemical ex- 
planation of the motions of the amoeba, and a fortiori of 
the behavior of the Infusoria, seems impossible to many 
of those who have closely observed these rudimentary 
organisms. Even in these humblest manifestations of 
life they discover traces of an effective psychological activ- 
ity. 1 But instructive above all is the fact that the ten- 
dency to explain everything by physics and chemistry is 
discouraged rather than strengthened by deep study of 
histological phenomena. Such is the conclusion of the 
truly admirable book which the histologist E. B. Wilson 

1 Cope, The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, Chicago, 1896, pp. 
475-484. 

'Maupas, "Etude des infusoires cilies" (Arch, de zoologie exp&ri- 
mentale, 1883, pp. 47, 491, 518, 549, in particular). P. Vignon, Re- 
cherches.de cytologic g&nerale sur les epitheliums, Paris, 1902, p. 655. A 
profound study of the motions of the Infusoria and a very penetrating 
criticism of the idea of tropism have been made recently by Jennings 
(Contributions to the Study of the Behavior of Lower Organisms, Wash- 
ington, 1904). The "type of behavior" of these lower organisms, as 
Jennings defines it (pp. 237-252), is unquestionably of the psychological 
order. 



36 CREATIVE EVOLUTION johap. 

has devoted to the development of the cell: "The study 
of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to widen rather than 
to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest 
forms of life from the inorganic world. 1 " 

To sum up, those who are concerned only with the 
functional activity of the living being are inclined to be- 
lieve that physics and chemistry will give us the key to 
biological processes. 2 They have chiefly to do, as a fact, 
with phenomena that are repeated continually in the living 
being, as in a chemical retort. This explains, in some 
measure, the mechanistic tendencies of physiology. On 
the contrary, those whose attention is concentrated on 
the minute structure of living tissues, on their genesis 
and evolution, histologists and embryogenists on the one 
hand, naturalists on the other, are interested in the retort 
itself, not merely in its contents. They find that this 
retort creates its own form through a unique series of acts 
that really constitute a history. Thus, histologists, em- 
bryogenists, and naturalists believe far less readily than 
physiologists in the physico-chemical character of vital 
actions. 

The fact is, neither one nor the other of these two theories, 
neither that which affirms nor that which denies the possi- 
bility of chemically producing an elementary organism, 
can claim the authority of experiment. They are both 
unverifiable, the former because science has not yet ad- 
vanced a step toward the chemical synthesis of a living 
substance, the second because there is no conceivable way 
of proving experimentally the impossibility of a fact. But 
we have set forth the theoretical reasons which prevent 
us from likening the living being, a system closed off by 

nature, to the systems which our science isolates. These 

1 E. B. Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, New York, 
1897, p. 330. 

2 Dastre, La Vie et la mort, p. 43. 



i.l RADICAL MECHANISM 37 

reasons have less force, we acknowledge, in the case of a 
rudimentary organism like the amoeba, which hardly 
evolves at all. But they acquire more when we consider 
a complex organism which goes through a regular cycle 
of transformations. The more duration marks the living 
being with its imprint, the more obviously the organism 
differs from a mere mechanism, over which duration glides 
without penetrating. And the demonstration has most 
force when it applies to the evolution of life as a whole, 
from its humblest origins to its highest forms, inasmuch as 
this evolution constitutes, through the unity and con- 
tinuity of the animated matter which supports it, a single 
indivisible history. Thus viewed, the evolutionist hypothe- 
sis does not seem so closely akin to the mechanistic con- 
ception of life as it is generally supposed to be. Of this 
mechanistic conception we do not claim, of course, to 
furnish a mathematical and final refutation. But the 
refutation which we draw from the consideration of real 
time, and which is, in our opinion, the only refutation 
possible, becomes the more rigorous and cogent the more 
frankly the evolutionist hypothesis is assumed. We must 
dwell a good deal more on this point. But let us first show 
more clearly the notion of life to which we are leading up. 

The mechanistic explanations, we said, hold good for 
the systems that our thought artificially detaches from the 
whole. But of the whole itself and of the systems which, 
within this whole, seem to take after it, we cannot admit 
a priori that they are mechanically explicable, for then 
time would be useless, and even unreal. The essence of 
mechanical explanation, in fact, is to regard the future 
and the past as calculable functions of the present, and thus 
to claim that all is given. On this hypothesis, past, 
present and future would be open at a glance to a super- 
human intellect capable of making the calculation. Indeed, 



38 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

the scientists who have believed in the universality and 
perfect objectivity of mechanical explanations have, 
consciously or unconsciously, acted on a hypothesis of 
this kind. Laplace formulated it with the greatest pre- 
cision: "An intellect which at a given instant knew all 
the forces with which nature is animated, and the respective 
situations of the beings that compose nature — supposing 
the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data 
to analysis — would embrace in the same formula the motions 
of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the 
slightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and 
the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes." 1 
And Du Bois-Reymond : "We can imagine the knowledge 
of nature arrived at a point where the universal process 
of the world might be represented by a single mathematical 
formula, by one immense system of simultaneous differ- 
ential equations, from which could be deduced, for each 
moment, the position, direction, and velocity of every 
atom of the world. " 2 Huxley has expressed the same idea 
in a more concrete form: "If the fundamental proposition 
of evolution is true, that the entire world, living and not 
living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according 
to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules 
of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was 
composed, it is no less certain that the existing world 
lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapor, and that a sufficient 
intellect could, from a knowledge of the properties of the 
molecules of that vapor, have predicted, say the state of 
the Fauna of Great Britain in 1869, with as much cer- 
tainty as one can say what will happen to the vapor of 
the breath in a cold winter's day." In such a doctrine, 

1 Laplace, Introduction a la theorie analytique des probability (CEuvres 
completes, vol. vii., Paris, 1886, p. vi.). 

2 Du Bois-Reymond, Vber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, Leipzig, 
1892. 



i.i RADICAL FINALISM 39 

time is still spoken of: one pronounces the word, but one 
does not think of the thing. For time is here deprived 
of efficacy, and if it does nothing, it is nothing. Radical 
mechanism implies a metaphysic in which the totality 
of the real is postulated complete in eternity, and in which 
the apparent duration of things expresses merely the in- 
firmity of a mind that cannot know everything at once. 
But duration is something very different from this for 
our consciousness, that is to say, for that which is most 
indisputable in our experience. We perceive duration 
as a stream against which we cannot go. It is the founda- 
tion of our being, and, as we feel, the very substance of 
the world in which we live. It is of no use to hold up 
before our eyes the dazzling prospect of a universal mathe- 
matic; we cannot sacrifice experience to the requirements 
of a system. That is why we reject radical mechanism. 

But radical finalism is quite as unacceptable, and for 
the same reason. The doctrine of teleology, in its extreme 
form, as we find it in Leibniz for example, implies that 
things and beings merely realize a programme previously 
arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention 
or creation in the universe, time is useless again. As in the 
mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that 
all is given. Finalism thus understood is only inverted 
mechanism. It springs from the same postulate, with 
this sole difference, that in the movement of our finite 
intellects along successive things, whose successiveness 
is reduced to a mere appearance, it holds in front of us the 
light with which it claims to guide us, instead of putting 
it behind. It substitutes the attraction of the future for 
the impulsion of the past. But succession remains none 
the less a mere appearance, as indeed does movement 
itself. In the doctrine of Leibniz, time is reduced to a 



40 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

confused perception, relative to the human standpoint, 
a perception which would vanish, like a rising mist, for a 
mind seated at the centre of things. 

Yet finalism is not, like mechanism, a doctrine with 
fixed rigid outlines. It admits of as many inflections 
as we like. The mechanistic philosophy is to be taken 
or left : it must be left if the least grain of dust, by straying 
from the path foreseen by mechanics, should show the 
slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine of final causes, 
on the contrary, will never be definitively refuted. If 
one form of it be put aside, it will take another. Its 
principle, which is essentially psychological, is very flexible. 
It is so extensible, and thereby so comprehensive, that one 
accepts something of it as soon as one rejects pure mech- 
anism. The theory we shall put forward in this book will 
therefore necessarily partake of finalism to a certain ex- 
tent. For that reason it is important to intimate exactly 
what we are going to take of it, and what we mean to leave. 

Let us say at once that to thin out the Leibnizian finalism 
by breaking it into an infinite number of pieces seems to 
us a step in the wrong direction. This is, however, the 
tendency of the doctrine of finality. It fully realizes that 
if the universe as a whole is the carrying out of a plan, 
this cannot be demonstrated empirically, and that even 
of the organized world alone it is hardly easier to prove 
all harmonious: facts would equally well testify to the 
contrary. Nature sets living beings at discord with one 
another. She everywhere presents disorder alongside 
of order, retrogression alongside of progress. But, though 
finality cannot be affirmed either of the whole of matter or 
of the whole of life, might it not yet be true, says the 
finalist, of each organism taken separately? Is there 
not a wonderful division of labor, a marvellous solidarity 
among the parts of an organism, perfect order in infinite 



ii RADICAL FINALISM 41 

complexity? Does not each living being thus realize 
a plan immanent in its substance? — This theory con- 
sists, at bottom, in breaking up the original notion of 
finality into bits. It does not accept, indeed it ridicules, 
the idea of an external finality, according to which living 
beings are ordered with regard to each other: to suppose 
the grass made for the cow, the lamb for the wolf — that is 
all acknowledged to be absurd. But there is, we are told, 
an internal finality: each being is made for itself, all its 
parts conspire for the greatest good of the whole and are 
intelligently organized in view of that end. Such is the 
notion of finality which has long been classic. Finalism 
has shrunk to the point of never embracing more than one 
living being at a time. By making itself smaller, it probably 
thought it would offer less surface for blows. 

The truth is, it lay open to them a great deal more. 
Radical as our own theory may appear, finality is external 
or it is nothing at all. 

Consider the most complex and the most harmonious 
organism. All the elements, we are told, conspire for 
the greatest good of the whole. Very well, but let us 
not forget that each of these elements may itself be an 
organism in certain cases, and that in subordinating the 
existence of this small organism to the life of the great 
one we accept the principle of an external finality. The 
idea of a finality that is always internal is therefore a self- 
destructive notion. An organism is composed of tissues, 
each of which lives for itself. The cells of which the tissues 
are made have also a certain independence. Strictly speak- 
ing, if the subordination of all the elements of the individ- 
ual to the individual itself were complete, we might contend 
that they are not organisms, reserve the name organism for 
the individual, and recognize only internal finality. But 
every one knows that these elements may possess a true au- 



42 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

tonomy. To say nothing of phagocytes, which push inde- 
pendence to the point of attacking the organism that 
nourishes them, or of germinal cells, which have their own 
life alongside the somatic cells — the facts of regeneration 
are enough: here an element or a group of elements sud- 
denly reveals that, however limited its normal space and 
function, it can transcend them occasionally; it may even, 
in certain cases, be regarded as the equivalent of the 
whole. 

There lies the stumbling-block of the vitalistic theories. 
We shall not reproach them, as is ordinarily done, with 
replying to the question by the question itself: the "vital 
principle" may indeed not explain much, but it is at least 
a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind 
us of this occasionally, 1 while mechanism invites us to 
ignore that ignorance. But the position of vitalism is 
rendered very difficult by the fact that, in nature, there is 
neither purely internal finality nor absolutely distinct 
individuality. The organized elements composing the 
individual have themselves a certain individuality, and 
each will claim its vital principle if the individual pre- 
tends to have its own. But, on the other hand, the in- 
dividual itself is not sufficiently independent, not sufficiently 
cut off from other things, for us to allow it a "vital princi- 

1 There are really two lines to follow in contemporary neo-vitalism: 
on the one hand, the assertion that pure mechanism is insufficient, 
which assumes great authority when made by such scientists as Driesch 
or Reinke, for example; and, on the other hand, the hypotheses which 
this vitalism superposes on mechanism (the ' ' entelechies ' ' of Driesch, 
and the "dominants" of Reinke, etc). Of these two parts, the former 
is perhaps the more interesting. See the admirable studies of Driesch — 
Die Lokalisation morphogenetischer Vorg'dnge, Leipzig, 1899; Die organ- 
ischen Regulationen, Leipzig, 1901; Naturbegriffe und Natururteile, Leip- 
zig, 1904; Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre, Leipzig, 1905; 
and of Reinke — Die Welt als Tat, Berlin, 1899; Einleitung in die 
theoretische Biologie, Berlin, 1901; Philosophic der Botanik, Leipzig, 
1905. 



i.i RADICAL FINALISM 43 

pie" of its own. An organism such as a higher vertebrate 
is the most individuated of all organisms; yet, if we take 
into account that it is only the development of an ovum 
forming part of the body of its mother and of a spermato- 
zoon belonging to the body of its father, that the egg 
(i.e. the ovum fertilized) is a connecting link between the 
two progenitors since it is common to their two sub- 
stances, we shall realize that every individual organism, 
even that of a man, is merely a bud that has sprouted on 
the combined body of both its parents. Where, then, 
does the vital principle of the individual begin or end? 
Gradually we shall be carried further and further back, 
up to the individual's remotest ancestors: we shall find 
him solidary with each of them, solidary with that little 
mass of protoplasmic jelly which is probably at the root 
of the genealogical tree of life. Being, to a certain extent, 
one with this primitive ancestor, he is also solidary with 
all that descends from the ancestor in divergent directions. 
In this sense each individual may be said to remain united 
with the totality of living beings by invisible bonds. So 
it is of no use to try to restrict finality to the individuality 
of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it 
includes the whole of life in a single indivisible embrace. 
This life common to all the living undoubtedly presents 
many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so mathe- 
matically one that it cannot allow each being to become 
individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single 
whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the 
out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which 
co-ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the 
organism itself, but also each living being with the col- 
lective whole of all others. 

Finality will not go down any easier for being taken 
as a powder. Either the hypothesis of a finality im- 



44 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

manent in life should be rejected as a whole, or it must 
undergo a treatment very different from pulverization. 

The error of radical finalism, as also that of radical 
mechanism, is to extend too far the application of certain 
concepts that are natural to our intellect. Originally, 
we think only in order to act. Our intellect has been 
cast in the mold of action. Speculation is a luxury, while 
action is a necessity. Now, in order to act, we begin by 
proposing an end; we make a plan, then we go on to the 
detail of the mechanism which will bring it to pass. This 
latter operation is possible only if we know what we can 
reckon on. We must therefore have managed to extract 
resemblances from nature, which enable us to anticipate 
the future. Thus we must, consciously or unconsciously, 
have made use of the law of causality. Moreover, the 
more sharply the idea of efficient causality is defined in 
our mind, the more it takes the form of a mechanical 
causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more 
mathematical according as it expresses a more rigorous 
necessity. That is why we have only to follow the bent 
of our mind to become mathematicians. But, on the 
other hand, this natural mathematics is only the rigid 
unconscious skeleton beneath our conscious supple habit 
of linking the same causes to the same effects ; and the usual 
object of this habit is to guide actions inspired by in- 
tentions, or, what comes to the same, to direct movements 
combined with a view to reproducing a pattern. We are 
born artisans as we are born geometricians, and indeed 
we are geometricians only because we are artisans. Thus 
the human intellect, inasmuch as it is fashioned for the 
needs of human action, is an intellect which proceeds at 
the same time by intention and by calculation, by adapt- 
ing means to ends and by thinking out mechanisms of 



i.l BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 45 

more and more geometrical form. Whether nature be 
conceived as an immense machine regulated by mathe- 
matical laws, or as the realization of a plan, these two ways I 
of regarding it are only the consummation of two tendencies 
of mind which are complementary to each other, and which 
have their origin in the same vital necessities. 

For that reason, radical finalism is very near radical 
mechanism on many points. Both doctrines are reluc- 
tant to see in the course of things generally, or even simply 
in the development of life, an unforeseeable creation of 
form. In considering reality, mechanism regards only 
the aspect of similarity or repetition. It is therefore 
dominated by this law, that in nature there is only like 
reproducing like. The more the geometry in mechanism 
is emphasized, the less can mechanism admit that any- 
thing is ever created, even pure form. In so far as we are 
geometricians, then, we reject the unforeseeable. We 
might accept it, assuredly, in so far as we are artists, for 
art lives on creation and implies a latent belief in the 
spontaneity of nature. But disinterested art is a luxury, 
like pure speculation. Long before being artists, we are 
artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives 
on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which 
serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models 
which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, 
it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new ar- 
rangement of elements already known. Its principle 
is that "we must have like to produce like." In short, 
the strict application of the principle of finality, like that 
of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the con- 
clusion that "all is given." Both principles say the same 
thing in their respective languages, because they respond 
to the same need. 

That is why again they agree in doing away with time. 



46 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, 
and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. If everything 
is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same 
concrete reality never recurs. Repetition is therefore 
possible only in the abstract: what is repeated is some 
aspect that our senses, and especially our intellect, have 
singled out from reality, just because our action, upon 
which all the effort of our intellect is directed, can move 
only among repetitions. Thus, concentrated on that 
which repeats, solely preoccupied in welding the same 
to the same, intellect turns away from the vision of time. 
It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies everything it touches. 
We do not think real time. But we live it, because life 
transcends intellect. The feeling we have of our evolution 
and of the evolution of all things in pure duration is there, 
forming around the intellectual concept properly so-called 
an indistinct fringe that fades off into darkness. Mechan- 
ism and finalism agree in taking account only of the bright 
nucleus shining in the centre. They forget that this 
nucleus has been formed out of the rest by condensation, 
and that the whole must be used, the fluid as well as and 
more than the condensed, in order to grasp the inner move- 
ment of life. 

Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and in- 
distinct, it should have more importance for philosophy 
than the bright nucleus it surrounds. For it is its presence 
that enables us to affirm that the nucleus is a nucleus, that 
pure intellect is a contraction, by condensation, of a more 
extensive power. And, just because this vague intuition 
is of no help in directing our action on things, which action 
takes place exclusively on the surface of reality, we may 
presume that it is to be exercised not merely on the sur- 
face, but below. 

As soon as we go out of the encasings in which radical 



M BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 47 

mechanism and radical finalism confine our thought, reality 
appears as a ceaseless upspringing of something new, which 
has no sooner arisen to make the present than it has al- 
ready fallen back into the past; at this exact moment it 
falls under the glance of the intellect, whose eyes are ever 
turned to the rear. This is already the case with our 
inner life. For each of our acts we shall easily find ante- 
cedents of which it may in some sort be said to be the 
mechanical resultant. And it may equally well be said 
that each action is the realization of an intention. In 
this sense mechanism is everywhere, and finality every- 
where, in the evolution of our conduct. But if our action 
be one that involves the whole of our person and is truly 
ours, it could not have been foreseen, even though its 
antecedents explain it when once it has been accomplished. 
And though it be the realizing of an intention, it differs, 
as a present and new reality, from the intention, which 
can never aim at anything but recommencing or rear- 
ranging the past. Mechanism and finalism are there- 
fore, here, only external views of our conduct. They 
extract its intellectuality. But our conduct slips between 
them and extends much further. Once again, this does 
not mean that free action is capricious, unreasonable 
action. To behave according to caprice is to oscillate 
mechanically between two or more ready-made alternatives 
and at length to settle on one of them; it is no real matur- 
ing of an internal state, no real evolution; it is merely — 
however paradoxical the assertion may seem — bending 
the will to imitate the mechanism of the intellect. A 
conduct that is truly our own, on the contrary, is that of a 
will which does not try to counterfeit intellect, and which, 
remaining itself — that is to say, evolving — ripens gradually 
into acts which the intellect will be able to resolve in- 
definitely into intelligible elements without ever reaching 



48 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

its goal. The free act is incommensurable with the idea, 
and its "rationality" must be defined by this very in- 
commensurability, which admits the discovery of as much 
intelligibility within it as we will. Such is the character 
of our own evolution; and such also, without doubt, that 
of the evolution of life. 

Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous, imagines itself 
possessed, by right of birth or by right of conquest, innate 
or acquired, of all the essential elements of the knowledge 
of truth. Even where it confesses that it does not know 
the object presented to it, it believes that its ignorance 
consists only in not knowing which one of its time-honored 
categories suits the new object. In what drawer, ready 
to open, shall we put it? In what garment, already cut 
out, shall we clothe it? Is it this, or that, or the other 
thing? And "this," and "that," and "the other thing" 
are always something already conceived, already known. 
The idea that for a new object we might have to create a 
new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply 
repugnant to us. The history of philosophy is there, how- 
ever, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the im- 
possibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready- 
made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity 
of making to measure. But, rather than go to this ex- 
tremity, our reason prefers to announce once for all, with 
a proud modesty, that it has to do only with the relative, 
and that the absolute is not in its province. This pre- 
liminary declaration enables it to apply its habitual method 
of thought without any scruple, and thus, under pretense 
that it does not touch the absolute, to make absolute 
judgments upon everything. Plato was the first to set up 
the theory that to know the real consists in finding its 
Idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame 
already at our disposal — as if we implicitly possessed uni- 



i.l BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 49 

versal knowledge. But this belief is natural to the human 
intellect, always engaged as it is in determining under what 
former heading it shall catalogue any new object; and it 
may be said that, in a certain sense, we are all born 
Platonists. 

Nowhere is the inadequacy of this method so obvious 
as in theories of life. If, in evolving in the direction of 
the vertebrates in general, of man and intellect in par- 
ticular, life has had to abandon by the way many elements 
incompatible with this particular mode of organization 
and consign them, as we shall show, to other lines of 
development, it is the totality of these elements that we 
must find again and rejoin to the intellect proper, in 
order to grasp the true nature of vital activity. And we 
shall probably be aided in this by the fringe of vague in- 
tuition that surrounds our distinct — that is, intellectual 
— representation. For what can this useless fringe be, 
if not that part of the evolving principle which has not 
shrunk to the peculiar form of our organization, but has 
settled around it unasked for, unwanted? It is there, 
accordingly, that we must look for hints to expand the 
intellectual form of our thought; from there shall we derive 
the impetus necessary to lift us above ourselves. I To 
form an idea of the whole of life cannot consist in combin- 
ing simple ideas that have been left behind in us by life 
itself in the course of its evolution. How could the part 
be equivalent to the whole, the content to the container, 
a by-product of the vital operation to the operation itself? 
Such, however, is our illusion when we define the evolution 
of life as a "passage from the homogeneous to the hetero- 
geneous, "'or by any other concept obtained by putting 
fragments of intellect side by side. We place ourselves 
in one of the points where evolution comes to a head — 
the principal one, no doubt, but not the only one; and 



50 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

there we do not even take all we find, for of the intellect 
we keep only one or two of the concepts by which it ex- 
presses itself; and it is this part of a part that we declare 
representative of the whole, of something indeed which 
goes beyond the concrete whole, I mean of the evolution 
movement of which this "whole" is only the present stage! 
The truth is, that to represent this the entire intellect 
would not be too much — nay, it would not be enough. 
It would be necessary to add to it what we find in every 
other terminal point of evolution. And these diverse 
and divergent elements must be considered as so many 
extracts which are, or at least which were, in their humblest 
form, mutually complementary. Only then might we 
have an inkling of the real nature of the evolution move- 
ment; and even then we should fail to grasp it completely, 
for we should still be dealing only with the evolved, which 
is a result, and not with evolution itself, which is the act 
by which the result is obtained. 

Such is the philosophy of life to which we are leading 
up. It claims to transcend both mechanism and finalism; 
but, as we announced at the beginning, it is nearer the 
second doctrine than the first. It will not be amiss to 
dwell on this point, and show more precisely how far this 
philosophy of life resembles finalism and wherein it is 
different. 

Like radical finalism, ' although in a vaguer form, our 
philosophy represents the organized world as a harmonious 
whole. But this harmony is far from being as perfect 
as it has been claimed to be. It admits of much discord, 
because each species, each individual even, retains only 
a certain impetus from the universal vital impulsion and 
tends to use this energy in its own interest. In this con- 
sists adaptation. The species and the individual thus 
think only of themselves — whence arises a possible conflict 



i.] BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 51 

with other forms of life. Harmony, therefore, does not 
exist in fact; it exists rather in principle; I mean that 
the original impetus is a common impetus, and the higher 
we ascend the stream of life the more do diverse tendencies 
appear complementary to each other. Thus the wind 
at a street-corner divides into diverging currents which 
are all one and the same gust. Harmony, or rather " com- 
plementarity, " is revealed only in the mass, in tendencies 
rather than in states. Especially (and this is the point 
on which finalism has been most seriously mistaken) 
harmony is rather behind us than before. It is due to an 
identity of impulsion and not to a common aspiration. 
It would be futile to try to assign to life an end, in the 
human sense of the word. To speak of an end is to think 
of a pre-existing model which has only to be realized. It 
is to suppose, therefore, that all is given, and that the future 
can be read in the present. It is to believe that life, in its 
movement and in its entirety, goes to work like our in- 
tellect, which is only a motionless and fragmentary view 
of life, and which naturally takes its stand outside of time. 
Life, on the contrary, progresses and endures in time. Of 
course, when once the road has been traveled, we can 
glance over it, mark its direction, note this in psychological 
terms and speak as if there had been pursuit of an end. 
Thus shall we speak ourselves. But, of the road which 
was going to be traveled, the human mind could have 
nothing to say, for the road has been created pari passu 
with the act of traveling over it, being nothing but the 
direction of this act itself. At every instant, then, evo- 
lution must admit of a psychological interpretation which 
is, from our point of view, the best interpretation; but 
this explanation has neither value nor even significance 
except retrospectively. Never could the finalistic inter- 
pretation, such as we shall propose it, be taken for an 



52 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

anticipation of the future. It is a particular mode of 
viewing the past in the light of the present. In short, 
the classic conception of finality postulates at once too 
much and too little: it is both too wide and too narrow. 
In explaining life by intellect, it limits too much the mean- 
ing of life: intellect, such at least as we find it in ourselves, 
has been fashioned by evolution during the course of 
progress; it is cut out of something larger, or, rather, 
it is only the projection, necessarily on a plane, of a reality 
that possesses both relief and depth. It is this more com- 
prehensive reality that true finalism ought to reconstruct, 
or, rather, if possible, embrace in one view. But, on the 
other hand, just because it goes beyond intellect — the 
faculty of connecting the same with the same, of per- 
ceiving and also of producing repetitions — this reality is 
undoubtedly creative, i. e. productive of effects in which 
it expands and transcends its own being. These effects 
were therefore not given in it in advance, and so it could 
not take them for ends, although, when once produced, 
they admit of a rational interpretation, like that of the 
manufactured article that has reproduced a model. In 
short, the theory of final causes does not go far enough when 
it confines itself to ascribing some intelligence to nature, 
and it goes too far when it supposes a pre-existence of 
the future in the present in the form of idea. And the 
second theory, which sins by excess, is the outcome of 
the first, which sins by defect. In place of intellect proper 
must be substituted the more comprehensive reality of 
which intellect is only the contraction. The future then 
appears as expanding the present: it was not, therefore, 
contained in the present in the form of a represented end. 
And yet, once realized, it will explain the present as much 
as the present explains it, and even more; it must be viewed 
as an end as much as, and more than, a result. Our in- 



i.l BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 53 

tellect has a right to consider the future abstractly from 
its habitual point of view, being itself an abstract view 
of the cause of its own being. 

It is true that the cause may then seem beyond our 
grasp. Already the finalist theory of life eludes all pre- 
cise verification. What if we go beyond it in one of its 
directions? Here, in fact, after a necessary digression, 
we are back at the question which we regard as essential: 
can the insufficiency of mechanism be proved by facts? 
We said that if this demonstration is possible, it is on con- 
dition of frankly accepting the evolutionist hypothesis. 
We must now show that if mechanism is insufficient to 
account for evolution, the way of proving this insufficiency 
is not to stop at the classic conception of finality, still 
less to contract or attenuate it, but, on the contrary, to 
go further. 

Let us indicate at once the principle of our demonstration. 
We said of life that, from its origin, it is the continuation 
of one and the same impetus, divided into divergent lines 
of evolution. Something has grown, something has de- 
veloped by a series of additions which have been so many 
creations. This very development has brought about a 
dissociation of tendencies which were unable to grow be- 
yond a certain point without becoming mutually incom- 
patible. Strictly speaking, there is nothing to prevent 
our imagining that the evolution of life might have taken 
place in one single individual by means of a series of trans- 
formations spread over thousands of ages. Or, instead 
of a single individual, any number might be supposed, 
succeeding each other in a unilinear series. In both cases 
evolution would have had, so to speak, one dimension only. 
But evolution has actually taken place through millions 
of individuals, on divergent lines, each ending at a crossing 
from which new paths radiate, and so on indefinitely. If 



54 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

our hypothesis is justified, if the essential causes working 
along these diverse roads are of psychological nature, they 
must keep something in common in spite of the divergence 
of their effects, as school-fellows long separated keep the 
same memories of boyhood. Roads may fork or by-ways 
be opened along which dissociated elements may evolve 
in an independent manner, but nevertheless it is in virtue 
of the primitive impetus of the whole that the movement of 
the parts continues. Something of the whole, therefore, 
must abide in the parts; and this common element will 
be evident to us in some way, perhaps by the presence of 
identical organs in very different organisms. Suppose, 
for an instant, that the mechanistic explanation is the true 
one: evolution must then have occurred through a series 
of accidents added to one another, each new accident 
being preserved by selection if it is advantageous to that 
sum of former advantageous accidents which the present 
form of the living being represents. What likelihood is 
there that, by two entirely different series of accidents 
being added together, two entirely different evolutions 
will arrive at similar results? The more two lines of evo- 
lution diverge, the less probability is there that accidental 
outer influences or accidental inner variations bring about 
the construction of the same apparatus upon them, es- 
pecially if there was no trace of this apparatus at the 
moment of divergence. But such similarity of the two 
products would be natural, on the contrary, on a hypothesis 
like ours : even in the latest channel there would be some- 
thing of the impulsion received at the source. Pure 
mechanism, then, would be refutable, and finality, in the 
special sense in which we understand it, would be demon- 
strable in a certain aspect, if it could be proved that life may 
manufacture the like apparatus, by unlike means, on di- 
vergent lines of evolution; and the strength of the proof 



I.] THE QUEST OF A CRITERION 55 

would be proportional both to the divergency between the. 
lines of evolution thus chosen and to the complexity of the 
similar structures found in them. 

It will be said that resemblance of structure is due to 
sameness of the general conditions in which life has evolved, 
and that these permanent outer conditions may have 
imposed the same direction on the forces constructing 
this or that apparatus, in spite of the diversity of transient 
outer influences and accidental inner changes. We are 
not, of course, blind to the role which the concept of 
adaptation plays in the science of to-day. Biologists cer- 
tainly do not all make the same use of it. Some think 
the outer conditions capable of causing change in organ- 
isms in a direct manner, in a definite direction, through 
physico-chemical alterations induced by them in the liv- 
ing substance; such is the hypothesis of Eimer, for example. 
Others, more faithful to the spirit of Darwinism, believe 
the influence of conditions works indirectly only, through 
favoring, in the struggle for life, those representatives of a 
species which the chance of birth has best adapted to the 
environment. In other words, some attribute a positive 
influence to outer conditions, and say that they actually 
give rise to variations, while the others say these conditions 
have only a negative influence and merely eliminate varia- 
tions. But, in both cases, the outer conditions are sup- 
posed to bring about a precise adjustment of the organism 
to its circumstances. Both parties, then, will attempt 
to explain mechanically, by adaptation to similar condi- 
tions, the similarities of structure which we think are the 
strongest argument against mechanism. So we must at 
once indicate in a general way, before passing to the detail, 
why explanations from "adaptation" seem to us insufficient. 

Let us first remark that, of the two hypotheses just 
described, the latter is the only one which is not equivocal. 



56 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

The Darwinian idea of adaptation by automatic elimina- 
tion of the unadapted is a simple and clear idea. But, 
just because it attributes to the outer cause which con- 
trols evolution a merely negative influence, it has great 
difficulty in accounting for the progressive and, so to say, 
rectilinear development of complex apparatus such as we 
are about to examine. How much greater will this diffi- 
culty be in the case of the similar structure of two extremely 
complex organs on two entirely different lines of evolution! 
An accidental variation, however minute, implies the 
working of a great number of small physical and chemical 
causes. An accumulation of accidental variations, such 
as would be necessary to produce a complex structure, 
requires therefore the concurrence of an almost infinite 
number of infinitesimal causes. Why should these causes, 
entirely accidental, recur the same, and in the same order, 
at different points of space and time? No one will hold 
that this is the case, and the Darwinian himself will probably 
merely maintain that identical effects may arise from 
different causes, that more than one road leads to the same 
spot. But let us not be fooled by a metaphor. The place 
reached does not give the form of the road that leads there ; 
while an organic structure is just the accumulation of 
those small differences which evolution has had to go 
through in order to achieve it. The struggle for life and 
natural selection can be of no use to us in solving this 
part of the problem, for we are not concerned here with 
what has perished, we have to do only with what has 
survived. Now, we see that identical structures have 
been formed on independent lines of evolution by a gradual 
accumulation of effects. How can accidental causes, 
occurring in an accidental order, be supposed to have 
repeatedly come to the same result, the causes being in- 
finitely numerous and the effect infinitely complicated? 



i.i THE QUEST OF A CRITERION 57 

The principle of mechanism is that "the same causes 
produce the same effects. " This principle, of course, does 
not always imply that the same effects must have the same 
causes; but it does involve this consequence in the particu- 
lar case in which the causes remain visible in the effect 
that they produce and are indeed its constitutive elements. 
That two walkers starting from different points and wan- 
dering at random should finally meet, is no great wonder. 
But that, throughout their walk, they should describe 
two identical curves exactly superposable on each other, 
is altogether unlikely. The improbability will be the 
greater, the more complicated the routes; and it will 
become impossibility, if the zigzags are infinitely com- 
plicated. Now, what is this complexity of zigzags as 
compared with that of an organ in which thousands of 
different cells, each being itself a kind of organism, are 
arranged in a definite order? 

Let us turn, then, to the other hypothesis, and see how 
it would solve the problem. Adaptation, it says, is not 
merely elimination of the unadapted; it is due to the posi- 
tive influence of outer conditions that have molded the 
organism on their own form. This time, similarity of 
effects will be explained by similarity of cause. We shall 
remain, apparently, in pure mechanism. But if we look 
closely, we shall see that the explanation is merely verbal, 
that we are again the dupes of words, and that the trick 
of the solution consists in taking the term " adaptation" 
in two entirely different senses at the same time. 

If I pour into the same glass, by turns, water and wine, 
the two liquids will take the same form, and the sameness 
in form will be due to the sameness in adaptation of content 
to container. Adaptation, here, really means mechanical 
adjustment. The reason is that the form to which the 
matter has adapted itself was there, ready-made, and 



58 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

has forced its own shape on the matter. But, in the 
adaptation of an organism to the circumstances it has to 
live in, where is the pre-existing form awaiting its matter? 
The circumstances are not a mold into which life is inserted 
and whose form life adopts: this is indeed to be fooled by 
a metaphor. There is no form yet, and the life must 
create a form for itself, suited to the circumstances which 
are made for it. It will have to make the best of these 
circumstances, neutralize their inconveniences and utilize 
their advantages — in short, respond to outer actions by 
building up a machine which has no resemblance to them. 
Such adapting is not repeating, but replying, — an entirely 
different thing. If there is still adaptation, it will be in 
the sense in which one may say of the solution of a problem 
of geometry, for example, that it is adapted to the con- 
ditions. I grant indeed that adaptation so understood 
explains why different evolutionary processes result in 
similar forms : the same problem, of course, calls for the 
same solution. But it is necessary then to introduce, 
as for the solution of a problem of geometry, an intelligent 
activity, or at least a cause which behaves in the same way. 
This is to bring in finality again, and a finality this time 
more than ever charged with anthropomorphic elements. 
In a word, if the adaptation is passive, if it is mere repetition 
in the relief of what the conditions give in the mold, it 
will build up nothing that one tries to make it build; and 
if it is active, capable of responding by a calculated solu- 
tion to the problem which is set out in the conditions, 
that is going further than we do — too far, indeed, in our 
opinion — in the direction we indicated in the beginning. 
But the truth is that there is a surreptitious passing from 
one of these two meanings to the other, a flight for refuge 
to the first whenever one is about to be caught in flagrante 
delicto of finalism by employing the second. It is really 



1.1 THE QUEST OF A CRITERION 59 

the second which serves the usual practice of science, but 
it is the first that generally provides its philosophy. In 
any 'particular case one talks as if the process of adaptation 
were an effort of the organism to build up a machine 
capable of turning external circumstances to the best 
possible account : then one speaks of adaptation in general 
as if it were the very impress of circumstances, passively 
received by an indifferent matter. 

But let us come to the examples. It would be interest- 
ing first to institute here a general comparison between 
plants and animals. One cannot fail to be struck with the 
parallel progress which has been accomplished, on both 
sides, in the direction of sexuality. Not only is fecunda- 
tion itself the same in higher plants and in animals, since 
it consists, in both, in the union of two nuclei that differ 
in their properties and structure before their union and 
immediately after become equivalent to each other; but 
the preparation of sexual elements goes on in both under 
like conditions: it consists essentially in the reduction of the 
number of chromosomes and the rejection of a certain 
quantity of chromatic substance. 1 Yet vegetables and 
animals have evolved on independent lines, favored by 
unlike circumstances, opposed by unlike obstacles. Here 
are two great series which have gone on diverging. On 
either line, thousands and thousands of causes have com- 
bined to determine the morphological and functional 
evolution. Yet these infinitely complicated causes have 
been consummated, in each series, in the same effect. And 
this effect could hardly be called a phenomenon of " adapt- 
ation" : where is the adaptation, where is the pressure 
of external circumstances? There is no striking utility 

1 P. Gu6rin, Les Connaissances actuelles sur la fecondation chez les 
phanerogames, Paris, 1904, pp. 144-148. Gf. Delage, L'HSrHiti, 
2nd edition, 1903, pp. 140 ff. 



60 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in sexual generation; it has been interpreted in the most 
diverse ways; and some very acute enquirers even regard 
the sexuality of the plant, at least, as a luxury which nature 
might have dispensed with. 1 But we do not wish to dwell 
on facts so disputed. The ambiguity of the term " adapta- 
tion," and the necessity of transcending both the point 
of view of mechanical causality and that of anthropomor- 
phic finality, will stand out more clearly with simpler 
examples. At all times the doctrine of finality has laid 
much stress on the marvellous structure of the sense- 
organs, in order to liken the work of nature to that of an 
intelligent workman. Now, since these organs are found, 
in a rudimentary state, in the lower animals, and since 
nature offers us many intermediaries between the pig- 
ment-spot of the simplest organisms and the infinitely 
complex eye of the vertebrates, it may just as well be 
alleged that the result has been brought about by natural 
selection perfecting the organ automatically. In short, 
if there is a case in which it seems justifiable to invoke 
adaptation, it is this particular one. For there may be 
discussion about the function and meaning of such a thing 
as sexual generation, in so far as it is related to the con- 
ditions in which it occurs; but the relation of the eye to 
light is obvious, and when we call this relation an adapta- 
tion, we must know what we mean. If, then, we can show, 
in this privileged case, the insufficiency of the principles 
invoked on both sides, our demonstration will at once 
have reached a high degree of generality. 

Let us consider the example on which the advocates 
of finality have always insisted: the structure of such 
an organ as the human eye. They have had no diffi- 

1 Mobius, BeUriige zur Lehre von der Fortpflanzung der Gewachse, 
Jena, 1897, pp. 203-206 in particular. Cf ; Hartog, ' ' Sur les phenomenes 
de reproduction" (Annee biologique, 1895, pp. 707-709). 



i.i THE CHOICE OF AN EXAMPLE 61 

culty in showing that in this extremely complicated ap- 
paratus all the elements are marvelously co-ordinated. 
In order that vision shall operate, says the author of a well- 
known book on Final Causes, "the sclerotic membrane 
must become transparent in one point of its surface, so 
as to enable luminous rays to pierce it . . . ; the cornea 
must correspond exactly with the opening of the socket 
. . .; behind this transparent opening there must be 
refracting media . . .; there must be a retina 1 at the 
extremity of the dark chamber . . .; perpendicular to 
the retina there must be an innumerable quantity of trans- 
parent cones permitting only the light directed in the line 
of their axes to reach the nervous membrane, " 2 etc. etc. In 
reply, the advocate of final causes has been invited to 
assume the evolutionist hypothesis. Everything is mar- 
velous, indeed, if one consider an eye like ours, in which 
thousands of elements are coordinated in a single function. 
But take the function at its origin, in the Infusorian, where 
it is reduced to the mere impressionability (almost purely 
chemical) of a pigment-spot to light: this function, pos- 
sibly only an accidental fact in the beginning, may have 
brought about a slight complication of the organ, which 
again induced an improvement of the function. It may 
have done this either directly, through some unknown 
mechanism, or indirectly, merely through the effect of 
the advantages it brought to the living being and the hold 
it thus offered to natural selection. Thus the progressive 
formation of an eye as well contrived as ours would be 
explained by an almost infinite number of actions and re- 
actions between the function and the organ, without the 
intervention of other than mechanical causes. 
The question is hard to decide, indeed, when put di- 

1 Paul Janet, Les Causes finales, Paris, 1876, p. 83. 
* Ibid. p. 80. 



62 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

rectly between the function and the organ, as is done in 
the doctrine of finality, as also mechanism itself does. For 
organ and function are terms of different nature, and each 
conditions the other so closely that it is impossible to say 
a priori whether in expressing their relation we should 
begin with the first, as does mechanism, or with the second, 
as finalism requires. But the discussion would take an 
entirely different turn, we think, if we began by comparing 
together two terms of the same nature, an organ with 
an organ, instead of an organ with its function. In this 
case, it would be possible to proceed little by little to a 
solution more and more plausible, and there would be 
the more chance of a successful issue the more resolutely 
we assumed the evolutionist hypothesis. 

Let us place side by side the eye of a vertebrate and 
that of a mollusc such as the common Pecten. We find 
the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous 
elements. The eye of the Pecten presents a retina, a 
cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own. There 
is even that peculiar inversion of retinal elements which 
is not met with, in general, in the retina of the inverte- 
brates. Now, the origin of molluscs may be a debated 
question, but, whatever opinion we hold, all are agreed 
that molluscs and vertebrates separated from their common 
parent-stem long before the appearance of an eye so com- 
plex as that of the Pecten. Whence, then, the structural 
analogy? 

Let us question on this point the two opposed systems 
of evolutionist explanation in turn — the hypothesis of 
purely accidental variations, and that of a variation di- 
rected in a definite way under the influence of external 
conditions. 

The first, as is well known, is presented to-day in two 
quite different forms. Darwin spoke of very slight vari- 



i.l THE CHOICE OF AN EXAMPLE 63 

ations being accumulated by natural selection. He was 
not ignorant of the facts of sudden variation; but he thought 
these " sports," as he called them, were only monstrosities 
incapable of perpetuating themselves; and he accounted 
for the genesis of species by an accumulation of insensible 
variations. 1 Such is still the opinion of many naturalists. 
It is tending, however, to give way to the opposite idea 
that a new species comes into being all at once by the 
simultaneous appearance of several new characters, all 
somewhat different from the previous ones. This latter 
hypothesis, already proposed by various authors, notably 
by Bateson in a remarkable book, 2 has become deeply 
significant and acquired great force since the striking ex- 
periments of Hugo de Vries. This botanist, working on 
the Oenothera Lamarckiana, obtained at the end of a few 
generations a certain number of new species. The theory 
he deduces from his experiments is of the highest interest. 
Species pass through alternate periods of stability and 
transformation. When the period of "mutability" occurs, 
unexpected forms spring forth in a great number of differ- 
ent directions. 3 — We will not attempt to take sides be- 
tween this hypothesis and that of insensible variations. 
Indeed, perhaps both are partly true. We wish merely 
to point out that if the variations invoked are accidental, 
they do not, whether small or great, account for a similar- 
ity of structure such as we have cited. 

Let us assume, to begin with, the Darwinian theory of 
insensible variations, and suppose the occurrence of small 
differences due to chance, and continually accumulating. 

1 Darwin, Origin of Species, chap. ii. 

2 Bateson, Materials for the Study of Variation, London, 1894, es- 
pecially pp. 567 ff. Cf. Scott, "Variations and Mutations" (American 
Journal of Science, Nov. 1894). 

3 De Vries, Die Mutationstheorie, Leipzig, 1901-1903. Gf., by the 
same author, Species and Varieties, Chicago, 1905. 



64 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

It must not be forgotten that all the parts of an organism 
are necessarily coordinated. Whether the function be 
the effect of the organ or its cause, it matters little; one 
point is certain — the organ will be of no use and will not 
give selection a hold unless it functions. However the 
minute structure of the retina may develop, and however 
complicated it may become, such progress, instead of 
favoring vision, will probably hinder it if the visual centres 
do not develop at the same time, as well as several parts of 
the visual organ itself. If the variations are accidental, 
how can they ever agree to arise in every part of the organ 
at the same time, in such way that the organ will con- 
tinue to perform its function? Darwin quite understood 
this; it is one of the reasons why he regarded variation 
as insensible. 1 For a difference which arises accidentally 
at one point of the visual apparatus, if it be very slight, 
will not hinder the functioning of the organ; and hence 
this first accidental variation can, in a sense, wait for comple- 
mentary variations to accumulate and raise vision to a 
higher degree of perfection. Granted; but while the 
insensible variation does not hinder the functioning of 
the eye, neither does it help it, so long as the variations 
that are complementary do not occur. How, in that case, 
can the variation be retained by natural selection? Un- 
wittingly one will reason as if the slight variation were a 
toothing stone set up by the organism and reserved for a 
later construction. This hypothesis, so little conformable 
to the Darwinian principle, is difficult enough to avoid 
even in the case of an organ which has been developed along 
one single main line of evolution, e.g. the vertebrate eye. 
But it is absolutely forced upon us when we observe the 
likeness of structure of the vertebrate eye and that of the 
molluscs. How could the same small variations, incal- 
1 Darwin, Origin of Species, chap. vi. 



i] INSENSIBLE VARIATION 65 

culable in number, have ever occurred in the same order 
on two independent lines of evolution, if they were purely 
accidental? And how could they have been preserved 
by selection and accumulated in both cases, the same in 
the same order, when each of them, taken separately, 
was of no use? 

Let us turn, then, to the hypothesis of sudden varia- 
tions, and see whether it will solve the problem. It cer- 
tainly lessens the difficulty on one point, but it makes it 
much worse on another. If the eye of the mollusc and 
that of the vertebrate have both been raised to their 
present form by a relatively small number of sudden 
leaps, I have less difficulty in understanding the resemblance 
of the two organs than if this resemblance were due to 
an incalculable number of infinitesimal resemblances 
acquired successively: in both cases it is chance that 
operates, but in the second case chance is not required 
to work the miracle it would have to perform in the first. 
Not only is the number of resemblances to be added some- 
what reduced, but I can also understand better how each 
could be preserved and added to the others; for the ele- 
mentary variation is now considerable enough to be an 
advantage to the living being, and so to lend itself to 
the play of selection. But here there arises another 
problem, no less formidable, viz., how do all the parts 
of the visual apparatus, suddenly changed, remain so 
well coordinated that the eye continues to exercise its 
function? For the change of one part alone will make 
vision impossible, unless this change is absolutely infinitesi- 
mal. The parts must then all change at once, each con- 
sulting the others. I agree that a great number of un- 
coordinated variations may indeed have arisen in less 
fortunate individuals, that natural selection may have 
eliminated these, and that only the combination fit to 



66 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

endure, capable of preserving and improving vision, has 
survived. Still, this combination had to be produced. 
And, supposing chance to have granted this favor once, 
can we admit that it repeats the self-same favor in the 
course of the history of a species, so as to give rise, every 
time, all at once, to new complications marvelously regu- 
lated with reference to each other, and so related to former 
complications as to go further on in the same direction? 
How, especially, can we suppose that by a series of mere 
"accidents" these sudden variations occur, the same, 
in the same order, — involving in each case a perfect har- 
mony of elements more and more numerous and complex — 
along two independent lines of evolution? 

The law of correlation will be invoked, of course; Dar- 
win himself appealed to it. 1 It will be alleged that a 
change is not localized in a single point of the organism, 
but has its necessary recoil on other points. The ex- 
amples cited by Darwin remain classic: white cats with 
blue eyes are generally deaf; hairless dogs have imperfect 
dentition, etc. — Granted; but let us not play now on the 
word Cc correlation. " A collective whole of solidary changes 
is one thing, a system of complementary changes — changes 
so coordinated as to keep up and even improve the function- 
ing of an organ under more complicated conditions — is 
another. That an anomaly of the pilous system should 
be accompanied by an anomaly of dentition is quite 
conceivable without our having to call for a special princi- 
ple of explanation; for hair and teeth are similar forma- 
tions, 2 and the same chemical change of the germ that 
hinders the formation of hair would probably obstruct 

1 Darwin, Origin of Species, chap. i. 

2 On this homology of hair and teeth, see Brandt, "tJber . . . eine 
mutmassliche Homologie der Haare und Zahne'' (Biol. Centralblatt, 
vol. xviii., 1898, especially pp. 262 ff.). 



i.] SUDDEN VARIATION 67 

that of teeth: it may be for the same sort of reason that 
white cats with blue eyes are deaf. In these different 
examples the " correlative" changes are only solidary 
changes (not to mention the fact that they are really 
lesions, namely, diminutions or suppressions, and not 
additions, which makes a great difference) . But when we 
speak of " correlative" changes occurring suddenly in 
the different parts of the eye, we use the word in an entirely 
new sense: this time there is a whole set of changes not 
only simultaneous, not only bound together by community 
of origin, but so coordinated that the organ keeps on per- 
forming the same simple function, and even performs it 
better. That a change in the germ, which influences the 
formation of the retina, may affect at the same time also 
the formation of the cornea, the iris, the lens, the visual 
centres, etc., I admit, if necessary, although they are forma- 
tions that differ much more from one another in their 
original nature than do probably hair and teeth. But 
that all these simultaneous changes should occur in such 
a way as to improve or even merely maintain vision, this 
is what, in the hypothesis of sudden variation, I cannot 
admit, unless a mysterious principle is to come in, whose 
duty it is to watch over the interest of the function. But 
this would be to give up the idea of " accidental" variation. 
In reality, these two senses of the word "correlation" are 
often interchanged in the mind of the biologist, just like 
the two senses of the word "adaptation." And the con- 
fusion is almost legitimate in botany, that science in which 
the theory of the formation of species by sudden variation 
rests on the firmest experimental basis. In vegetables, 
function is far less narrowly bound to form than in animals. 
Even profound morphological differences, such as a change 
in the form of leaves, have no appreciable influence on 
the exercise of function, and so do not require a whole 



68 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

system of complementary changes for the plant to remain 
fit to survive. But it is not so in the animal, especially 
in the case of an organ like the eye, a very complex struc- 
ture and very delicate function. Here it is impossible 
to identify changes that are simply solidary with changes 
which are also complementary. The two senses of the 
word "correlation" must be carefully distinguished; it 
would be a downright paralogism to adopt one of them 
in the premisses of the reasoning, and the other in the con- 
clusion. And this is just what is done when the principle 
of correlation is invoked in explanations of detail in order 
to account for complementary variations, and then cor- 
relation in general is spoken of as if it were any group of 
variations provoked by any variation of the germ. Thus, 
the notion of correlation is first used in current science 
as it might be used by an advocate of finality; it is under- 
stood that this is only a convenient way of expressing one- 
self, that one will correct it and fall back on pure mechan- 
ism when explaining the nature of the principles and turn- 
ing from science to philosophy. And one does then come 
back to pure mechanism, but only by giving a new meaning 
to the word "correlation" — a meaning which would now 
make correlation inapplicable to the detail it is called 
upon to explain. 

To sum up, if the accidental variations that bring about 
evolution are insensible variations, some good genius must 
be appealed to — the genius of the future species — in order 
to preserve and accumulate these variations, for selection 
will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the acci- 
dental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function 
to go on or for a new function to take its place, all the 
changes that have happened together must be comple- 
mentary. So we have to fall back on the good genius 
again, this time to obtain the convergence of simultaneous 



I.] ORTHOGENESIS 69 

changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of di- 
rection of successive variations. But in neither case can 
parallel development of the same complex structures on 
independent lines of evolution be due to a mere accu- 
mulation of accidental variations. So we come to the 
second of the two great hypotheses we have to examine. 
Suppose the variations are due, not to accidental and inner 
causes, but to the direct influence of outer circumstances. 
Let us see what line we should have to take, on this hypothe- 
sis, to account for the resemblance of eye-structure in 
two series that are independent of each other from the 
phylogenetic point of view. 

Though molluscs and vertebrates have evolved separately, 
both have remained exposed to the influence of light. And 
light is a physical cause bringing forth certain definite effects. 
Acting in a continuous way, it has been able to produce 
a continuous variation in a constant direction. Of course 
it is unlikely that the eye of the vertebrate and that of the 
mollusc have been built up by a series of variations due to 
simple chance. Admitting even that light enters into 
the case as an instrument of selection, in order to allow 
only useful variations to persist, there is no possibility 
that the play of chance, even thus supervised from with- 
out, should bring about in both cases the same juxta- 
position of elements coordinated in the same way. But it 
would be different supposing that light acted directly on the 
organized matter so as to change its structure and some- 
how adapt this structure to its own form. The resemblance 
of the two effects would then be explained by the identity 
of the cause. The more and more complex eye would be 
something like the deeper and deeper imprint of light on a 
matter which, being organized, possesses a special aptitude 
for receiving it. 

But can an organic structure be likened to an imprint? 



70 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

We have already called attention to the ambiguity of 
the term "adaptation." The gradual complication of a 
form which is being better and better adapted to the mold 
of outward circumstances is one thing, the increasingly 
complex structure of an instrument which derives more and 
more advantage from these circumstances is another. In 
the former case, the matter merely receives an imprint; 
in the second, it reacts positively, it solves a problem. Ob- 
viously it is this second sense of the word "adapt" that 
is used when one says that the eye has become better and 
better adapted to the influence of light. But one passes 
more or less unconsciously from this sense to the other, and 
a purely mechanistic biology will strive to make the passive 
adaptation of an inert matter, which submits to the in- 
fluence of its environment, mean the same as the active 
adaptation of an organism which derives from this in- 
fluence an advantage it can appropriate. It must be 
owned, indeed, that Nature herself appears to invite. our 
mind to confuse these two kinds of adaptation, for she 
usually begins by a passive adaptation where, later on, 
she will build up a mechanism for active response. Thus, 
in the case before us, it is unquestionable that the first 
rudiment of the eye is found in the pigment-spot of the 
lower organisms; this spot may indeed have been pro- 
duced physically, by the mere action of light, and there are 
a great number of intermediaries between the simple spot 
of pigment and a complicated eye like that of the verte- 
brates. — But, from the fact that we pass from one thing 
to another by degrees, it does not follow that the two 
things are of the same nature. From the fact that an 
orator falls in, at first, with the passions of his audience 
in order to make himself master of them, it will not be 
concluded that to follow is the same as to lead. Now, liv- 
ing matter seems to have no other means of turning cir- 



i.i ORTHOGENESIS 71 

cumstances to good account than by adapting itself to 
them passively at the outset. Where it has to direct a 
movement, it begins by adopting it. Life proceeds by 
insinuation. The intermediate degrees between a pig- 
ment-spot and an eye are nothing to the point: however 
numerous the degrees, there will still be the same interval 
between the pigment-spot and the eye as between a photo- 
graph and a photographic apparatus. Certainly the photo- 
graph has been gradually turned into" a photographic 
apparatus; but could light alone, a physical force, ever 
have provoked this change, and converted an impression 
left by it into a machine capable of using it? 

It may be claimed that considerations of utility are 
out of place here; that the eye is not made to see, but that 
we see because we have eyes; that the organ is what it is, 
and "utility " is a word by which we designate the functional 
effects of the structure. But when I say that the eye 
"makes use of" light, I do not merely mean that the eye 
is capable of seeing; I allude to the very precise relations 
that exist between this organ and the apparatus of lo- 
comotion. The retina of vertebrates is prolonged in an 
optic nerve, which, again, is continued by cerebral centres 
connected with motor mechanisms. Our eye makes use 
of light in that it enables us to utilize, by movements of 
reaction, the objects that we see to be advantageous, and 
to avoid those which we see to be injurious. Now, of 
course, as light may have produced a pigment-spot by 
physical means, so it can physially determine the move- 
ments of certain organisms; ciliated Infusoria, for in- 
stance, react to light. But no one would hold that the 
influence of light has physically caused the formation of 
a nervous system, of a muscular system, of an osseous 
system, all things which are continuous with the apparatus 
of vision in vertebrate animals. The truth is, when one 



72 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

speaks of the gradual formation of the eye, and, still more, 
when one takes into account all that is inseparably con- 
nected with it, one brings in something entirely different 
from the direct action of light. One implicitly attributes 
to organized matter a certain capacity sui generis, the 
mysterious power of building up very complicated machines 
to utilize the simple excitation that it undergoes. 

But this is just what is claimed to be unnecessary. 
Physics and chemistry are said to give us the key to every- 
thing. Eimer's great work is instructive in this respect. 
It is well known what persevering effort this biologist 
has devoted to demonstrating that transformation is 
brought about by the influence of the external on the in- 
ternal, continuously exerted in the same direction, and 
not, as Darwin held, by accidental variations. His theory 
rests on observations of the highest interest, of which the 
starting-point was the study of the course followed by 
the color variation of the skin in certain lizards. Before 
this, the already old experiments of Dorfmeister had 
shown that the same chrysalis, according as it was sub- 
mitted to cold or heat, gave rise to very different butter- 
flies, which had long been regarded as independent species, 
Vanessa levana and Vanessa prorsa: an intermediate tem- 
perature produces an intermediate form. We might class 
with these facts the important transformations observed 
in a little crustacean, Artemia salina, when the salt of 
the water it lives in is increased or diminished. 1 In these 
various experiments the external agent seems to act as a 
cause of transformation. But what does the word u cause" 

1 It seems, from later observations, that the transformation of 
Artemia is a more complex phenomenon than was first supposed. 
See on this subject Samter and Heymons, "Die Variation bei Artemia 
Salina" (Anhang zu den Abhandlungen der k. preussischen Akad. der 
Wissenschaften, 1902). 



i] ORTHOGENESIS 73 

mean here? Without undertaking an exhaustive analysis 
of the idea of causality, we will merely remark that three 
very different meanings of this term are commonly con- 
fused. A cause may act by impelling, releasing, or un- 
winding. The billiard-ball, that strikes another, deter- 
mines its movement by impelling. The spark that explodes 
the powder acts by releasing. The gradual relaxing of 
the spring, that makes the phonograph turn, unwinds the 
melody inscribed on the cylinder: if the melody which is 
played be the effect, and the relaxing of the spring the 
cause, we must say that the cause acts by unwinding. 
What distinguishes these three cases from each other is 
the greater or less solidarity between the cause and the effect. 
In the first, the quantity and quality of the effect vary 
with the quantity and quality of the cause. In the second, 
neither quality nor quantity of the effect varies with quality 
and quantity of the cause: the effect is invariable. In 
the third, the quantity of the effect depends on the quantity 
of the cause, but the cause does not influence the quality of 
the effect: the longer- the cylinder turns by the action 
of the spring, the more of the melody I shall hear, but the 
nature of the melody, or of the part heard, does not depend 
on the action of the spring. Only in the first case, really, 
does cause explain effect; in the others the effect is more 
or less given in advance, and the antecedent invoked is — 
in different degrees, of course — its occasion rather than 
its cause. Now, in saying that the saltness of the water 
is the cause of the transformations of Artemia, or that the 
degree of temperature determines the color and marks 
of the wings which a certain chrysalis will assume on be- 
coming a butterfly, is the word "cause" used in the first 
sense? Obviously not : causality has here an intermediary 
sense between those of unwinding and releasing. Such, 
indeed, seems to be Eimer's own meaning when he speaks 



74 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

of the "kaleidoscopic" character of the variation, 1 or 
when he says that the variation of organized matter works 
in a definite way, just as inorganic matter crystallizes in 
definite directions. 2 And it may be granted, perhaps, 
that the process is a merely physical and chemical one in 
the case of the color-changes of the skin. But if this sort 
of explanation is extended to the case of the gradual forma- 
tion of the eye of the vertebrate, for instance, it must be 
supposed that the physico-chemistry of living bodies is 
such that the influence of light has caused the organism 
to construct a progressive series of visual apparatus, all 
extremely complex, yet all capable of seeing, and of seeing 
better and better. 3 What more could the most confirmed 
finalist say, in order to mark out so exceptional a physico- 
chemistry? And will not the position of a mechanistic 
philosophy become still more difficult, when it is pointed 
out to it that the egg of a mollusc cannot have the same 
chemical composition as that of a vertebrate, that the 
organic substance which evolved toward the first of these 
two forms could not have been chemically identical with 
that of the substance which went in the other direction, 
and that, nevertheless, under the influence of light, the 
same organ has been constructed in the one case as in 
the other? 

The more we reflect upon it, the more we shall see that 
this production of the same effect by two different ac- 
cumulations of an enormous number of small causes is 
contrary to the principles of mechanistic philosophy. 
We have concentrated the full force of our discussion upon 
an example drawn from phylogenesis. But ontogenesis 
would have furnished us with facts no less cogent. Every 

1 Ernie 7 *, Orthogenesis der Schmetterlinge, Leipzig, 1897, p. 24. Cf. 
Die Entstehung der Arten, p. 53. 

2 Eimer, Die Entstehung der Arten, Jena, 1888, p. 25. 

3 Ibid. pp. 165 ff. 






i.j ORTHOGENESIS • 75 

moment, right before our eyes, nature arrives at identical 
results, in sometimes neighboring species, by entirely 
different embryogenic processes. Observations of "heter- 
oblastia" have multiplied in late years, 1 and it has been 
necessary to reject the almost classical theory of the 
specificity of embryonic gills. Still keeping to our compari- 
son between the eye of vertebrates and that of molluscs, 
we may point out that the retina of the vertebrate is 
produced by an expansion in the rudimentary brain of 
the young embryo. It is a regular nervous centre which 
has moved toward the periphery. In the mollusc, on the 
contrary, the retina is derived from the ectoderm directly, 
and not indirectly by means of the embryonic encephalon. 
Quite different, therefore, are the evolutionary processes 
which lead, in man and in the Pecten, to the development 
of a like retina. But, without going so far as to compare 
two organisms so distant from each other, we might reach 
the same conclusion simply by looking at certain very 
curious facts of regeneration in one and the same organism. 
If the crystalline lens of a Triton be removed, it is re- 
generated by the iris. 2 Now, the original lens was built 
out of the ectoderm, while the iris is of mesodermic origin. 
What is more, in the Salamandra maculata, if the lens be 
removed and the iris left, the regeneration of the lens takes 
place at the upper part of the iris; but if this upper part 
of the iris itself be taken away, the regeneration takes 
place in the inner or retinal layer of the remaining region. 3 

1 Salensky, ' Heteroblastie " (Proc. of the Fourth International Con- 
gress of Zoology, London, 1899, pp. 111-118). Salensky has coined 
this word to designate the cases in which organs that are equivalent, 
but of different embryological origin, are formed at the same points 
in animals related to each other. 

* Wolff, "Die Regeneration der Urodelenlinse " (Arch. f. Entvnck- 
dungsmechanik, i., 1895, pp. 380 ff.). 

s Fischel, "Uber die Regeneration der Linse" (Anat. Anzeiger, xiv., 
1898, pp. 373-380). 



76 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

Thus, parts differently situated, differently constituted, 
meant normally for different functions, are capable of 
performing the same duties and even of manufacturing, 
when necessary, the same pieces of the machine. Here 
we have, indeed, the same effect obtained by different 
combinations of causes. 

Whether we will or no, we must appeal to some inner 
directing principle in order to account for this convergence 
of effects. Such convergence does not appear possible 
in the Darwinian, and especially the neo-Darwinian, theory 
of insensible accidental variations, nor in the hypothesis 
of sudden accidental variations, nor even in the theory 
that assigns definite directions to the evolution of the 
various organs by a kind of mechanical composition of 
the external with the internal forces. So we come to 
the only one of the present forms of evolution which re- 
mains for us to mention, viz., neo-Lamarckism. 

It is well known that Lamarck attributed to the living 
being the power of varying by use or disuse of its organs, 
and also of passing on the variation so acquired to its 
descendants. A certain number of biologists hold a 
doctrine of this kind to-day. The variation that results 
in a new species is not, they believe, merely an accidental 
variation inherent in the germ itself, nor is it governed by a 
determinism sui generis which develops definite characters 
in a definite direction, apart from every consideration of 
utility. It springs from the very effort of the living being 
to adapt itself to the circumstances of its existence. The 
effort may indeed be only the mechanical exercise of cer- 
tain organs, mechanically elicited by the pressure of ex- 
ternal circumstances. But it may also imply consciousness 
and will, and it is in this sense that it appears to be under- 
stood by one of the most eminent representatives of the 



i] VARIATION AND HEREDITY 77 

doctrine, the American naturalist Cope. 1 Neo-Lamarckism 
is therefore, of all the later forms of evolutionism, the only 
one capable of admitting an internal and psychological 
principle of development, although it is not bound to do 
so. And it is also the only evolutionism that seems to 
us to account for the building up of identical complex 
organs on independent lines of development. For it is 
quite conceivable that the same effort to turn the same 
circumstances to good account might have the same result, 
especially if the problem put by the circumstances is such 
as to admit of only one solution. But the question re- 
mains, whether the term "effort" must not then be taken 
in a deeper sense, a sense even more psychological than 
any neo-Lamarckian supposes. 

For a mere variation of size is one thing, and a change 
of form is another. That an organ can be strengthened 
and grow by exercise, nobody will deny. But it is a long 
way from that to the progressive development of an eye 
like that of the molluscs and of the vertebrates. If this 
development be ascribed to the influence of light, long 
continued but passively received, we fall back on the theory 
we have just criticized. If, on the other hand, an internal 
activity is appealed to, then it must be something quite 
different from what we usually call an effort, for never 
has an effort been known to produce the slightest com- 
plication of an organ, and yet an enormous number of 
complications, all admirably coordinated, have been 
necessary to pass from the pigment-spot of the Infusorian 
to the eye of the vertebrate. But, even if we accept this 
notion of the evolutionary process in the case of animals, 
how can we apply it to plants? Here, variations of form 
do not seem to imply, nor always to lead to, functional 

1 Cope, The Origin of the Fittest, 1887; The Primary Factors of Organic 
Evolution, 1896. 



78 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

changes; and even if the cause of the variation is of a 
psychological nature, we can hardly call it an effort, unless 
we give a very unusual extension to the meaning of the 
word. The truth is, it is necessary to dig beneath the effort 
itself and look for a deeper cause. 

This is especially necessary, we believe, if we wish to 
get at a cause of regular hereditary variations. We are 
not going to enter here into the controversies over the 
transmissibility of acquired characters; still less do we 
wish to take too definite a side on this question, which is 
not within our province. But we cannot remain com- 
pletely indifferent to it. Nowhere is it clearer that phi- 
losophers can not to-day content themselves with vague 
generalities, but must follow the scientists in experimental 
detail and discuss the results with them. If Spencer had 
begun by putting to himself the question of the heredita- 
bility of acquired characters, his evolutionism would no 
doubt have taken an altogether different form. If (as 
seems probable to us) a habit contracted by the individual 
were transmitted to its descendants only in very exceptional 
cases, all the Spencerian psychology would need re-making, 
and a large part of Spencer's philosophy would fall to 
pieces. Let us say, then, how the problem seems to us to 
present itself, and in what direction an attempt might be 
made to solve it. 

After having been affirmed as a dogma, the trans- 
missibility of acquired characters has been no less dog- 
matically denied, for reasons drawn a priori from the 
supposed nature of germinal cells. It is well known how 
Weismann was led, by his hypothesis of the continuity 
of the germ-plasm, to regard the germinal cells — ova and 
spermatozoa — as almost independent of the somatic cells. 
Starting from this, it has been claimed, and is still claimed 
by many, that the hereditary transmission of an acquired 



i.l VARIATION AND HEREDITY 79 

character is inconceivable. But if, perchance, experiment 
should show that acquired characters are transmissible, 
it would prove thereby that the germ-plasm is not so 
independent of the somatic envelope as has been contended, 
and the transmissibility of acquired characters would 
become ipso facto conceivable; which amounts to saying 
that conceivability and inconceivability have nothing 
to do with the case, and that experience alone must settle 
the matter. But it is just here that the difficulty begins. 
The acquired characters we are speaking of are generally 
habits or the effects of habit, and at the root of most habits 
there is a natural disposition. So that one can always 
ask whether it is really the habit acquired by the soma of 
the individual that is transmitted, or whether it is not 
rather a natural aptitude, which existed prior to the habit. 
This aptitude would have remained inherent in the germ- 
plasm which the individual bears within him, as it was 
in the individual himself and consequently in the germ 
whence he sprang. Thus, for instance, there is no proof 
that the mole has become blind because it has formed the 
habit of living underground; it is perhaps because its 
eyes were becoming atrophied that it condemned itself 
to a life underground. 1 If this is the case, the tendency to 
lose the power of vision has been transmitted from germ 
to germ without anything being acquired or lost by the 
soma of the mole itself. From the fact that the son of a 
fencing-master has become a good fencer much more quickly 
than his father, we cannot infer that the habit of the parent 
has been transmitted to the child; for certain natural 
dispositions in course of growth may have passed from the 
plasma engendering the father to the plasma engendering 

1 Cu6not, "La Nouvelle ThSorie transformiste" (Revue generate des 
sciences, 1894). Cf. Morgan, Evolution and Adaptation, London, 1903, 
p. 357. 



80 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

the son, may have grown on the way by the effect of the 
primitive impetus, and thus assured to the son a greater 
suppleness than the father had, without troubling, so to 
speak, about what the father did. So of many examples 
drawn from the progressive domestication of animals: 
it is hard to say whether it is the acquired habit that is 
transmitted or only a certain natural tendency — that, 
indeed, which has caused such and such a particular 
species or certain of its representatives to be specially 
chosen for domestication. The truth is, when every 
doubtful case, every fact open to more than one inter- 
pretation, has been eliminated, there remains hardly a 
single unquestionable example of acquired and trans- 
mitted peculiarities, beyond the famous experiments 
of Brown-Sequard, repeated and confirmed by other 
physiologists. 1 By cutting the spinal cord or the sciatic 
nerve of guinea-pigs, Brown-Sequard brought about an 
epileptic state which was transmitted to the descendants. 
Lesions of the same sciatic nerve, of the restiform body, etc., 
provoked various troubles in the guinea-pig which its 
progeny inherited sometimes in a quite different form: 
exophthalmia, loss of toes, etc. But it is not demonstrated 
that in these different cases of hereditary transmission 
there had been a real influence of the soma of the animal 
on its germ-plasm. Weismann at once objected that the 
operations of Brown-Sequard might have introduced cer- 
tain special microbes into the body of the guinea-pig, 
which had found their means of nutrition in the nervous 
tissues and transmitted the malady by penetrating into 
the sexual elements.' This objection has been answered 

1 Brown-Sequard, ' ' Nouvelles recherches sur l'epilepsie due a certaines 
lesions de la moelle epinieere et des nerfs rachidiens" (Arch.de physi- 
ologie, vol. ii., 1866, pp. 211, 422, and 497). 

2 Weismann, Aufsatze uber Vererbung, Jena, 1892, pp. 376-378, and 
also Vortrage uber Descendenztheorie, Jena, 1902, vol. ii., p. 76. 



i.l VARIATION AND HEREDITY 81 

by Brown-Sequard himself; 1 but a more plausible one 
might be raised. Some experiments of Voisin and Peron 
have shown that fits of epilepsy are followed by the elimi- 
nation of a toxic body which, when injected into animals, 2 
is capable of producing convulsive symptoms. Perhaps 
the trophic disorders following the nerve lesions made by 
Brown-Sequard correspond to the formation of precisely 
this convulsion-causing poison. If so, the toxin passed 
from the guinea-pig to its spermatozoon or ovum, and 
caused in the development of the embryo a general dis- 
turbance, which, however, had no visible effects except 
at one point or another of the organism when developed. 
In that case, what occurred would have been somewhat 
the same as in the experiments of Charrin, Delamare, 
and Moussu, where guinea-pigs in gestation, whose liver 
or kidney was injured, transmitted the lesion to their 
progeny, simply because the injury to the mother's organ 
had given rise to specific "cytotoxins" which acted on 
the corresponding organ of the foetus. 3 It is true that, in 
these experiments, as in a former observation of the same 
physiologists/ it was the already formed foetus that was 
influenced by the toxins. But other researches of Charrin 
have resulted in showing that the same effect may be pro- 
duced, by an analogous process, on the spermatozoa and 
the ova. 5 To conclude, then: the inheritance of an ac- 

1 Brown-Sequard, "Her6dit6 d'une affection due a une cause acci- 
dentelle" (Arch, de physiologie, 1892, pp. 686 ff.). 

2 Voisin and Peron, "Recherches sur la toxicite urinaire chez les 
epileotiques " (Arch, de neurologie, vol. xxiv., 1892, and xxv., 1893. 
Cf. ths work of Voisin, L'fipilepsie, Paris, 1897, pp. 125-133). 

3 Charrin, Delamare and Moussu, "Transmission experimental aux 
descendants de lesions developp6es chez les ascendants" (C R. de I' Acad, 
des sciences, vol. cxxxv., 1902, p. 191). Cf. Morgan, Evolution and 
Adaptation, p. 257, and Delage, L'Heredite, 2nd edition, p. 388. 

4 Charrin and Delamare, "Heredite cellulaire" (C. R. de VAcad. des 
sciences, vol. cxxxiii., 1901, pp. 69-71). 

5 Charrin, "L'H.6T6dit6 pathologique" (Revue generate des sciences, 
15 Janvier 1896). 



82 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

quired peculiarity in the experiments of Brown-Sequard 
can be explained by the effect of a toxin on the germ. The 
lesion, however well localized it seems, is transmitted by 
the same process as, for instance, the taint of alcoholism. 
But may it not be the same in the case of every acquired 
peculiarity that has become hereditary? 

There is, indeed, one point on which both those who 
affirm and those who deny the transmissibility of acquired 
characters are agreed, namely, that certain influences, 
such as that of alcohol, can affect at the same time both 
the living being and the germ-plasm it contains. In such 
case, there is inheritance of a defect, and the result is 
as if the soma of the parent had acted on the germ-plasm, 
although in reality soma and plasma have simply both 
suffered the action of the same cause. Now, suppose 
that the soma can influence the germ-plasm, as those 
believe who hold that acquired characters are trans- 
missible. Is not the most natural hypothesis to suppose 
that things happen in this second case as in the first, and 
that the direct effect of the influence of the soma is a 
general alteration of the germ-plasm? If this is the case, 
it is by exception, and in some sort by accident, that the 
modification of the descendant is the same as that of the 
parent. It is like the hereditability of the alcoholic taint: 
it passes from father to children, but it may take a different 
form in each child, and in none of them be like what it 
was in the father. Let the letter C represent the change 
in the plasm, C being either positive or negative, that is to 
say, showing either the gain or loss of certain substances. 
The effect will not be an exact reproduction of the cause, 
nor will the change in the germ-plasm, provoked by a cer- 
tain modification of a certain part of the soma, determine 
a similar modification of the corresponding part of the 
new organism in process of formation, unless all the other 



i.j VARIATION AND HEREDITY 83 

nascent parts of this organism enjoy a kind of immunity 
as regards C: the same part will then undergo alteration 
in the new organism, because it happens that the develop- 
ment of this part is alone subject to the new influence. 
And, even then, the part might be altered in an entirely 
different way from that in which the corresponding part 
was altered in the generating organism. 

We should propose, then, to introduce a distinction 
between the hereditability of deviation and that of char- 
acter. An individual which acquires a new character 
thereby deviates from the form it previously had, which 
form the germs, or oftener the half-germs, it contains 
would have reproduced in their development. If this 
modification does not involve the production of sub- 
stances capable of changing the germ-plasm, or does not 
so affect nutrition as to deprive the germ-plasm of certain 
of its elements, it will have no effect on the offspring of 
the individual. This is probably the case as a rule. If, 
on the contrary, it has some effect, this is likely to be due 
to a chemical change which it has induced in the germ- 
plasm. This chemical change might, by exception, bring 
about the original modification again in the organism which 
the germ is about to develop, but there are as many and 
more chances that it will do something else. In this 
latter case, the generated organism will perhaps deviate 
from the normal type as much as the generating organism, 
but it will do so differently. It will have inherited deviation 
and not character. In general, therefore, the habits 
formed by an individual have probably no echo in its 
offspring; and when they have, the modification in the 
descendants may have no visible likeness to the original 
one. Such, at least, is the hypothesis which seems to 
us most likely. In any case, in default of proof to the con- 
trary, and so long as the decisive experiments called for 



84 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

by an eminent biologist 1 have not been made, we must 
keep to the actual results of observation. Now, even if 
we take the most favorable view of the theory of the trans- 
missibility of acquired characters, and assume that the 
ostensible acquired character is not, in most cases, the 
more or less tardy development of an innate character, 
facts show us that hereditary transmission is the excep- 
tion and not the rule. How, then, shall we expect it 
to develop an organ such as the eye? When we think 
of the enormous number of variations, all in the same 
direction, that we must suppose to be accumulated before 
the passage from the pigment-spot of the Infusorian 
to the eye of the mollusc and of the vertebrate is possible, 
we do not see how heredity, as we observe it, could ever 
have determined this piling-up of differences, even sup- 
posing that individual efforts could have produced each 
of them singly. That is to say that neo-Lamarckism is 
no more able than any other form of evolutionism to 
solve the problem. 

In thus submitting the various present forms of evo- 
lutionism to a common test, in showing that they all 
strike against the same insurmountable difficulty, we 
have in no wise the intention of rejecting them altogether. 
On the contrary, each of them, being supported by a 
considerable number of facts, must be true in its way. 
Each of them must correspond to a certain aspect of the 
process of evolution. Perhaps even it is necessary that 
a theory should restrict itself exclusively to a particular 
point of view, in order to remain scientific, i.e. to give a 
precise direction to researches into detail. But the reality 
of which each of these theories takes a partial view must 
transcend them all. And this reality is the special object 
of philosophy, which is not constrained to scientific pre- 

1 Giard, Controverses trans formistes, Paris, 1904, p. 147. 



i.i RESULT OF THE DISCUSSION 85 

cision because it contemplates no practical application. 
Let us therefore indicate in a word or two the positive 
contribution that each of the three present forms of evo- 
lutionism seems to us to make toward the solution of the 
problem, what each of them leaves out, and on what point 
this threefold effort should, in our opinion, converge in 
order to obtain a more comprehensive, although thereby 
of necessity a less definite, idea of the evolutionary process. 
The neo-Darwinians are probably right, we believe, 
when they teach that the essential causes of variation 
are the differences inherent in the germ borne by the 
individual, and not the experiences or behavior of the 
individual in the course of his career. Where we fail to 
follow these biologists, is in regarding the differences 
inherent in the germ as purely accidental and individual. 
We cannot help believing that these differences are the 
development of an impulsion which passes from germ to 
germ across the individuals, that they are therefore not 
pure accidents, and that they might well appear at the 
same time, in the same form, in all the representatives of 
the same species, or at least in a certain number of them. 
Already, in fact, the theory of mutations is modifying Dar- 
winism profoundly on this point. It asserts that at a 
given moment, after a long period, the entire species is 
beset with a tendency to change. The tendency to change, 
therefore, is not accidental. True, the change itself would 
be accidental, since the mutation works, according to 
De Vries, in different directions in the different representa- 
tives of the species. But, first we must see if the theory 
is confirmed by many other vegetable species (De Vries 
has verified it only by the Oenothera Lamarckiana) , l and 

1 Some analogous facts, however, have been noted, all in the vegetable 
world. See Blaringhem, "La Notion d'espece et la theorie de la mu- 
tation" (Annee psychologique, vol. xii., 1906, pp. 95 ff.), and De Vries, 
Species and Varieties, p. 655. 



86 CREATIVE EVOLUTION (chap. 

then there is the possibility, as we shall explain further 
on, that the part played by chance is much greater in the 
variation of plants than in that of animals, because, in 
the vegetable world, function does not depend so strictly 
on form. Be that as it may, the neo-Darwinians are 
inclined to admit that the periods of mutation are deter- 
minate. The direction of the mutation may therefore 
be so as well, at least in animals, and to the extent we shall 
have to indicate. 

We thus arrive at a hypothesis like Eimer's, according 
to which the variations of different characters continue 
from generation to generation in definite directions. This 
hypothesis seems plausible to us, within the limits in which 
Eimer himself retains it. Of course, the evolution of the 
organic world cannot be predetermined as a whole. We 
claim, on the contrary, that the spontaneity of life is mani- 
fested by a continual creation of new forms succeeding 
others. But this indetermination cannot be complete; it 
must leave a certain part to determination. An organ like 
the eye, for example, must have been formed by just a 
continual changing in a definite direction. Indeed, we 
do not see how otherwise to explain the likeness of structure 
of the eye in species that have not the same history. Where 
we differ from Eimer is in his claim that combinations 
of physical and chemical causes are enough to secure the 
result. We have tried to prove, on the contrary, by the 
example of the eye, that if there is "orthogenesis" here, 
a psychological cause intervenes. 

Certain neo-Lamarckians do indeed resort to a cause 
of a psychological nature. There, to our thinking, is 
one of the most solid positions of neo-Lamarckism. But 
if this cause is nothing but the conscious effort of the in- 
dividual, it cannot operate in more than a restricted num- 
ber of cases — at most in the animal world, and not at all 



i.l RESULT OF THE DISCUSSION 87 

in the vegetable kingdom. Even in animals, it will act 
only on points which are under the direct or indirect con- 
trol of the will. And even where it does act, it is not clear 
how it could compass a change so profound as an increase 
of complexity: at most this would be conceivable if the 
acquired characters were regularly transmitted so as to 
be added together; but this transmission seems to be 
the exception rather than the rule. A hereditary change 
in a definite direction, which continues to accumulate 
and add to itself so as to build up a more and more complex 
machine, must certainly be related to some sort of effort, 
but to an effort of far greater depth than the individual 
effort, far more independent of circumstances, an effort 
common to most representatives of the same species, 
inherent in the germs they bear rather than in their sub- 
stance alone, an effort thereby assured of being passed on 
to their descendants. 

So we come back, by a somewhat roundabout way, 
to the idea we started from, that of an original impetus 
of life, passing from one generation of germs to the fol- 
lowing generation of germs through the developed organ- 
isms which bridge the interval between the generations. 
This impetus, sustained right along the lines of evolution 
among which it gets divided, is the fundamental cause 
of variations, at least of those that are regularly passed 
on, that accumulate and create new species. In general, 
when species have begun to diverge from a common stock, 
they accentuate their divergence as they progress in their 
evolution. Yet, in certain definite points, they may evolve 
identically; in fact, they must do so if the hypothesis of a 
common impetus be accepted. This is just what we shall 
have to show now in a more precise way, by the same 
example we have chosen, the formation of the eye in 



88 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

molluscs and vertebrates. The idea of an "original 
impetus," moreover, will thus be made clearer. 

Two points are equally striking in an organ like the 
eye: the complexity of its structure and the simplicity 
of its function. The eye is composed of distinct parts, 
such as the sclerotic, the cornea, the retina, the crystalline, 
lens, etc. In each of these parts the detail is infinite. The 
retina alone comprises three layers of nervous elements — 
multipolar cells, bipolar cells, visual cells — each of which 
has its individuality and is undoubtedly a very compli- 
cated organism: so complicated, indeed, is the retinal 
membrane in its intimate structure, that no simple de- 
scription can give an adequate idea of it. The mechanism 
of the eye is, in short, composed of an infinity of mechan- 
isms, all of extreme complexity. Yet vision is one simple 
fact. As soon as the eye opens, the visual act is effected. 
Just because the act is simple, the slightest negligence 
on the part of nature in the building of the infinitely com- 
plex machine would have made vision impossible. This 
contrast between the complexity of the organ and the 
unity of the function is what gives us pause. 

A mechanistic theory is one which means to show us 
the gradual building-up of the machine under the influence 
of external circumstances intervening either directly by 
action on the tissues or indirectly by the selection of better- 
adapted ones. But, whatever form this theory may take, 
supposing it avails at all to explain the detail of the parts, 
it throws no light on their correlation. 

Then comes the doctrine of finality, which says that 
the parts have been brought together on a preconceived 
plan with a view to a certain end. In this it likens the 
labor of nature to that of the workman, who also pro- 
ceeds by the assemblage of parts with a view to the real- 
ization of an idea or the imitation of a model. Mechanism, 



i.l THE VITAL IMPETUS 89 

here, reproaches finalism with its anthropomorphic charac- 
ter, and rightly. But it fails to see that itself proceeds 
according to this method — somewhat mutilated! True, 
it has got rid of the end pursued or the ideal model. But 
it also holds that nature has worked like a human being 
by bringing parts together, while a mere glance at the 
development of an embryo shows that life goes to work 
in a very different way. Life does not 'proceed by the as- 
sociation and addition of elements, but by dissociation and 
division. 

We must get beyond both points of view, both mechanism 
and finalism being, at bottom, only standpoints to which 
the human mind has been led by considering the work of 
man. But in what direction can we go beyond them? 
We have said that in analyzing the structure of an organ, 
we can go on decomposing for ever, although the function 
of the whole is a simple thing. This contrast between 
the infinite complexity of the organ and the extreme 
simplicity of the function is what should open our eyes. 

In general, when the same object appears in one aspect 
and in another as infinitely complex, the two aspects 
have by no means the same importance, or rather the same 
degree of reality. In such cases, the simplicity belongs to 
the object itself, and the infinite complexity to the views 
we take in turning around it, to the symbols by which our 
senses or intellect represent it to us, or, more generally, 
to elements of a different order, with which we try to imitate 
it artificially, but with which it remains incommensurable, 
being of a different nature. An artist of genius has painted 
a figure on his canvas. We can imitate his picture with 
many-colored squares of mosaic. And we shall reproduce 
the curves and shades of the model so much the better 
as our squares are smaller, more numerous and more varied 
in tone. But an infinity of elements infinitely small, 



90 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

presenting an infinity of shades, would be necessary to 
obtain the exact equivalent of the figure that the artist 
has conceived as a simple thing, which he has wished to 
transport as a whole to the canvas, and which is the more 
complete the more it strikes us as the projection of an 
indivisible intuition. Now, suppose our eyes so made 
that they cannot help seeing in the work of the master 
a mosaic effect. Or suppose our intellect so made that it 
cannot explain the appearance of the figure on the canvas 
except as a work of mosaic. We should then be able to 
speak simply of a collection of little squares, and we should 
be under the mechanistic hypothesis. We might add 
that, beside the materiality of the collection, there must 
be a plan on which the artist worked; and then we should 
be expressing ourselves as finalists. But in neither case 
should we have got at the real process, for there are no 
squares brought together. It is the picture, i.e. the simple 
act, projected on the canvas, which, by the mere fact of 
entering into our perception, is decomposed before our 
eyes into thousands and thousands of little squares which 
present, as decomposed, a wonderful arrangement. So 
the eye, with its marvelous complexity of structure, may be 
only the simple act of vision, divided for us into a mosaic 
of cells, whose order seems marvelous to us because we 
have conceived the whole as an assemblage. 

If I raise my hand from A to B, this movement appears 
to me under two aspects at once. Felt from within, it is a 
simple, indivisible act. Perceived from without, it is the 
course of a certain curve, AB. In this curve I can dis- 
tinguish as many positions as I please, and the line it- 
self might be defined as a certain mutual coordination of 
these positions. But the positions, infinite in number, 
and the order in which they are connected, have sprung 
automatically from the indivisible act by which my hand 



i.l THE VITAL IMPETUS 91 

has gone from A to B. Mechanism, here, would consist 
in seeing only the positions. Finalism would take their 
order into account. But both mechanism and finalism 
would leave on one side the movement, which is reality 
itself. In one sense, the movement is more than the 
positions and than their order; for it is sufficient to make 
it in its indivisible simplicity to secure that the infinity 
of the successive positions as also their order be given at 
once — with something else which is neither order nor 
position but which is essential, the mobility. But, in 
another sense, the movement is less than the series of 
positions and their connecting order; for, to arrange 
points in a certain order, it is necessary first to conceive 
the order and then to realize it with points, there must 
be the work of assemblage and there must be intelligence, 
whereas the simple movement of the hand contains noth- 
ing of either. It is not intelligent, in the human sense 
of the word, and it is not an assemblage, for it is not made 
up of elements. Just so with the relation of the eye to 
vision. There is in vision more than the component cells 
of the eye and their mutual coordination: in this sense, 
neither mechanism nor finalism go far enough. But, in 
another sense, mechanism and finalism both go too far, 
for they attribute to Nature the most formidable of the 
labors of Hercules in holding that she has exalted to the 
simple act of vision an infinity of infinitely complex ele- 
ments, whereas Nature has had no more trouble in making 
an eye than I have in lifting my hand. Nature's simple 
act has divided itself automatically into an infinity of 
elements which are then found to be coordinated to one 
idea, just as the movement of my hand has dropped an 
infinity of points which are then found to satisfy one 
equation. 
We find it very hard to see things in that light, because 



92 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

we cannot help conceiving organization as manufacturing. 
But it is one thing to manufacture, and quite another to 
organize. Manufacturing is peculiar to man. It consists 
in assembling parts of matter which we have cut out in 
such manner that we can fit them together and obtain 
from them a common action. The parts are arranged, so 
to speak, around the action as an ideal centre. To manu- 
facture, therefore, is to work from the periphery to the 
centre, or, as the philosophers say, from the many to the 
one. Organization, on the contrary, works from the centre 
to the periphery. It begins in a point that is almost a 
mathematical point, and spreads around this point by 
concentric waves which go on enlarging. The work of 
manufacturing is the more effective, the greater the quant- 
ity of matter dealt with. It proceeds by concentration 
and compression. The organizing act, on the contrary, 
has something explosive about it: it needs at the begin- 
ning the smallest possible place, a minimum of matter, 
as if the organizing forces only entered space reluctantly.- 
The spermatozoon, which sets in motion the evolutionary 
process of the embryonic life, is one of the smallest cells 
of the organism; and it is only a small part of the sperma- 
tozoon which really takes part in the operation. 

But these are only superficial differences. Digging 
beneath them, we think, a deeper difference would be found. 

A manufactured thing delineates exactly the form of 
the work of manufacturing it. I mean that the manu- 
facturer finds in his product exactly what he has put 
into it. If he is going to make a machine, he cuts out 
its pieces one by one and then puts them together: the 
machine, when made, will show both the pieces and their 
assemblage. The whole of the result represents the whole 
of the work; and to each part of the work corresponds 
a part of the result. 



i.l THE VITAL IMPETUS 93 

Now I recognize that positive science can and should 
proceed as if organization was like making a machine. 
Only so will it have any hold on organized bodies. For 
its object is not to show us the essence of things, but to 
furnish us with the best means of acting on them. Physics 
and chemistry are well advanced sciences, and living matter 
lends itself to our action only so far as we can treat it by the 
processes of our physics and chemistry. Organization 
can therefore only be studied scientifically if the organized 
body has first been likened to a machine. The cells will 
be the pieces of the machine, the organism their assemblage, 
and the elementary labors which have organized the parts 
will be regarded as the real elements of the labor which has 
organized the whole. This is the standpoint of science. 
Quite different, in our opinion, is that of philosophy. 

For us, the whole of an organized machine may, strictly 
speaking, represent the whole of the organizing work 
(this is, however, only approximately true), yet the parts 
of the machine do not correspond to parts of the work, 
because the materiality of this machine does not represent 
a sum of means employed, but a sum of obstacles avoided: it 
is a negation rather than a positive reality. So, as we have 
shown in a former study, vision is a power which should 
attain by right an infinity of things inaccessible to our eyes. 
But such a vision would not be continued into action; it 
might suit a phantom, but not a living being. The vision 
of a living being is an effective vision, limited to objects on 
which the being can act: it is a vision that is canalized, 
and the visual apparatus simply symbolizes the work of 
canalizing. Therefore the creation of the visual apparatus 
is no more explained by the assembling of its anatomic 
elements than the digging of a canal could be explained 
by the heaping-up of the earth which might have formed its 
banks. A mechanistic theory would maintain that the 



94 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

earth had been brought cart-load by cart-load; finalisni 
would add that it had not been dumped down at random, 
that the carters had followed a plan. But both theories 
would be mistaken, for the canal has been made in another 
way. 

With greater precision, we may compare the process 
by which nature constructs an eye to the simple act by 
which we raise the hand. But we supposed at first that 
the hand met with no resistance. Let us now imagine 
that, instead of moving in air, the hand has to pass through 
iron filings which are compressed and offer resistance 
to it in proportion as it goes forward. At a certain moment 
the hand will have exhausted its effort, and, at this very 
moment, the filings will be massed and coordinated in a 
certain definite form, to wit, that of the hand that is stopped 
and of a part of the arm. Now, suppose that the hand and 
arm are invisible. Lookers-on will seek the reason of the 
arrangement in the filings themselves and in forces within 
the mass. Some will account for the position of each filing 
by the action exerted upon it by the neighboring filings: 
these are the mechanists. Others will prefer to think that 
a plan of the whole has presided over the detail of these 
elementary actions, they are the finalists. But the truth 
is that there has been merely one indivisible act, that of 
the hand passing through the filings: the inexhaustible 
detail of the movement of the grains, as well as the order 
of their final arrangement, expresses negatively, in a way, 
this undivided movement, being the unitary form of a 
resistance, and not a synthesis of positive elementary 
actions. For this reason, if the arrangement of the grains 
is termed an "effect" and the movement of the hand a 
" cause, " it may indeed be said that the whole of the effect 
is explained by the whole of the cause, but to parts of the 
cause parts of the effect will in no wise correspond. In 



i] THE VITAL IMPETUS 95 

other words, neither mechanism nor finalism will here be in 
place, and we must resort to an explanation of a different 
kind. Now, in the hypothesis we propose, the relation 
of vision to the visual apparatus would be very nearly 
that of the hand to the iron filings that follow, canalize 
and limit its motion. 

The greater the effort of the hand, the farther it will 
go into the filings. But at whatever point it stops, in- 
stantaneously and automatically the filings coordinate 
and find their equilibrium. So with vision and its organ. 
According as the undivided act constituting vision ad- 
vances more or less, the materiality of the organ is made 
of a more or less considerable number of mutually co- 
ordinated elements, but the order is necessarily complete 
and perfect. It could not be partial, because, once again 
the real process which gives rise to it has no parts. That 
is what neither mechanism nor finalism takes into account, 
and it is what we also fail to consider when we wonder 
at the marvelous structure of an instrument such as the 
eye. At the bottom of our wondering is always this idea, 
that it would have been possible for a part only of this 
coordination to have been realized, that the complete 
realization is a kind of special favor. This favor the 
finalists consider as dispensed to them all at once, by the 
final cause; the mechanists claim to obtain it little by 
little, by the effect of natural selection; but both see 
something positive in this coordination, and consequently 
something fractionable in its cause, — something which 
admits of every possible degree of achievement. In 
reality, the cause, though more or less intense, cannot 
produce its effect except in one piece, and completely 
finished. According as it goes further and further in 
the direction of vision, it gives the simple pigmentary 
masses of a lower organism, or the rudimentary eye of 



96 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

a Serpula, or the slightly differentiated eye of the Alciope, 
or the marvelously perfected eye of the bird ; but all these 
organs, unequal as is their complexity, necessarily present 
an equal coordination. For this reason, no matter how 
distant two animal species may be from each other, if the 
progress toward vision has gone equally far in both, there 
is the same visual organ in each case, for the form of the 
organ only expresses the degree in which the exercise of 
the function has been obtained. 

But, in speaking of a progress toward vision, are we 
not coming back to the old notion of finality? It would 
be so, undoubtedly, if this progress required the conscious 
or unconscious idea of an end to be attained. But it is 
really effected in virtue of the original impetus of life; 
it is implied in this movement itself, and that is just why 
it is found in independent lines of evolution. If now we 
are asked why and how it is implied therein, we reply 
that life is, more than anything else, a tendency to act on 
inert matter. The direction of this action is not prede- 
termined; hence the unforeseeable variety of forms which 
life, in evolving, sows along its path. But this action 
always presents, to some extent, the character of con- 
tingency; it implies at least a rudiment of choice. Now 
a choice involves the anticipatory idea of several possible 
actions. Possibilities of action must therefore be marked 
out for the living being before the action itself. Visual 
perception is nothing else: 1 the visible outlines of bodies 
are the design of our eventual action on them. Vision 
will be found, therefore, in different degrees in the most 
diverse animals, and it will appear in the same complexity 
of structure wherever it has reached the same degree of 
intensity. 

We have dwelt on these resemblances of structure 

1 See, on this subject, Matilre et m6moire, chap. i. 



i.] THE VITAL IMPETUS 97 

in general, and on the example of the eye in particular, 
because we had to define our attitude toward mechanism 
on the one hand and finalism on the other. It remains 
for us to describe it more precisely in itself. This we 
shall now do by showing the divergent results of evolution 
not as presenting analogies, but as themselves mutually 
complementary. 



CHAPTER II 

THE DIVEEGENT DIRECTIONS OP THE EVOLUTION OP LIFE. 
TORPOR, INTELLIGENCE, INSTINCT 

The evolution movement would be a simple one, and 
we should soon have been able to determine its direc- 
tion, if life had described a single course, like that of a 
solid ball shot from a cannon. But it proceeds rather 
like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which 
fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn 
into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a 
time incommensurably long. We perceive only what is 
nearest to us, namely, the scattered movements of the 
pulverized explosions. From them we have to go back, 
stage by stage, to the original movement. 

When a shell bursts, the particular way it breaks is 
explained both by the explosive force of the powder it 
contains and by the resistance of the metal. So of the 
way life breaks into individuals and species. It depends, 
we think, on two series of causes : the resistance life meets 
from inert matter, and the explosive force — due to an 
unstable balance of tendencies — which life bears within 
itself. 

The resistance of inert matter was the obstacle that 

had first to be overcome. Life seems to have succeeded 

in this by dint of humility, by making itself very small 

and very insinuating, bending to physical and chemical 

forces, consenting even to go a part of the way with them, 

like the switch that adopts for a while the direction of 

98 



ii.] DIVERGENT TENDENCIES 99 

the rail it is endeavoring to leave. Of phenomena in 
the simplest forms of life, it is hard to say whether they are 
still physical and chemical or whether they are already 
vital. Life had to enter thus into the habits of inert matter, 
in order to draw it little by little, magnetized, as it were, 
to another track. The animate forms that first appeared 
were therefore of extreme simplicity. They were probably 
tiny masses of scarcely differentiated protoplasm, out- 
wardly resembling the amoeba observable to-day, but 
possessed of the tremendous internal push that was to 
raise them even to the highest forms of life. That in 
virtue of this push the first organisms sought to grow as 
much as possible, seems likely. But organized matter 
has a limit of expansion that is very quickly reached; 
beyond a certain point it divides instead of growing. 
Ages of effort and prodigies of subtlety were probably 
necessary for life to get past this new obstacle. It suc- 
ceeded in inducing an increasing number of elements, 
ready to divide, to remain united. By the division of 
labor it knotted between them an indissoluble bond. The 
complex and quasi-discontinuous organism is thus made 
to function as would a continuous living mass which 
had simply grown bigger. 

But the real and profound causes of division were those 
which life bore within its bosom. For life is tendency, 
and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a 
sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions 
among which its impetus is divided. This we observe in 
ourselves, in the evolution of that special tendency which we 
call our character. Each of us, glancing back over his 
history, will find that his child-personality, though in- 
divisible, united in itself divers persons, which could re- 
main blended just because they were in their nascent state: 
this indecision, so charged with promise, is one of the 



100 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

greatest charms of childhood. But these interwoven 
personalities become incompatible in course of growth, 
and, as each of us can live but one life, a choice must 
perforce be made. We choose in reality without ceasing; 
without ceasing, also, we abandon many things. The 
route we pursue in time is strewn with the remains of all 
that we began to be, of all that we might have become. 
But nature, which has at command an incalculable number 
of lives, is in no wise bound to make such sacrifices. She 
preserves the different tendencies that have bifurcated 
with their growth. She creates with them diverging 
series of species that will evolve separately. 

These series may, moreover, be of unequal import- 
ance. The author who begins a novel puts into his hero 
many things which he is obliged to discard as he goes on. 
Perhaps he will take them up later in other books, and make 
new characters with them, who will seem like extracts from, 
or rather like complements of, the first; but they will al- 
most always appear somewhat poor and limited in compari- 
son with the original character. So with regard to the 
evolution of life. The bifurcations on the way have been 
numerous, but there have been many blind alleys beside 
the two or three highways ; and of these highways them- 
selves, only one, that which leads through the vertebrates 
up to man, has been wide enough to allow free passage 
to the full breath of life. We get this impression when 
we compare the societies of bees and ants, for instance, 
with human societies. The former are admirably ordered 
and united, but stereotyped; the latter are open to every 
sort of progress, but divided, and incessantly at strife 
with themselves. The ideal would be a society always in 
progress and always in equilibrium, but this ideal is perhaps 
unrealizable: the two characteristics that would fain com- 
plete each other, which do complete each other in their 



xi.i ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 101 

embryonic state, can no longer abide together when they 
grow stronger. If one could speak, otherwise than meta- 
phorically, of an impulse toward social life, it might be said 
that the brunt of the impulse was borne along the line of 
evolution ending at man, and that the rest of it was col- 
lected on the road leading to the hymenoptera: the so- 
cieties of ants and bees would thus present the aspect 
complementary to ours. But this would be only a manner 
of expression. There has been no particular impulse 
towards social life; there is simply the general movement 
of life, which on divergent lines is creating forms ever new. 
If societies should appear on two of these lines, they ought 
to show divergence of paths at the same time as community 
of impetus. They will thus develop two classes of char- 
acteristics which we shall find vaguely complementary 
of each other. 

So our study of the evolution movement will have to 
unravel a certain number of divergent directions, and to 
appreciate the importance of what has happened along 
each of them — in a word, to determine the nature of the 
dissociated tendencies and estimate their relative pro- 
portion. Combining these tendencies, then, we shall get 
an approximation, or rather an imitation, of the indivisible 
motor principle whence their impetus proceeds. Evo- 
lution will thus prove to be something entirely different 
from a series of adaptations to circumstances, as mechan- 
ism claims ; entirely different also from the realization of a 
plan of the whole, as maintained by the doctrine of finality. 

That adaptation to environment is the necessary con- 
dition of evolution we do not question for a moment. 
It is quite evident that a species would disappear, should 
it fail to bend to the conditions of existence which are im- 
posed on it. But it is one thing to recognize that outer 



102 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

circumstances are forces evolution must reckon with, 
another to claim that they are the directing causes of 
evolution. This latter theory is that of mechanism. It 
excludes absolutely the hypothesis of an original impetus, 
I mean an internal push that has carried life, by more and 
more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies. Yet 
this impetus is evident, and a mere glance at fossil species 
shows us that life need not have evolved at all, or might 
have evolved only in very restricted limits, if it had chosen 
the alternative, much more convenient to itself, of be- 
coming anchylosed in its primitive forms. Certain Fora- 
minifera have not varied since the Silurian epoch. Un- 
moved witnesses of the innumerable revolutions that have 
upheaved our planet, the Lingulae are to-day what they 
were at the remotest times of the paleozoic era. 

The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities of 
the movement of evolution, but not its general directions, 
still less the movement itself. 1 The road that leads to 
the town is obliged to follow the ups and downs of the hills ; 
it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the 
accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, nor 
have they given it its direction. At every moment they 
furnish it with what is indispensable, namely, the soil on 
which it lies ; but if we consider the whole of the road, in- 
stead of each of its parts, the accidents of the ground appear 
only as impediments or causes of delay, for the road aims 
simply at the town and would fain be a straight line. Just 
so as regards the evolution of life and the circumstances 
through which it passes — with this difference, that evo- 
lution does not mark out a solitary route, that it takes 
directions without aiming at ends, and that it remains 
inventive even in its adaptations. 

1 This view of adaptation has been noted by M. F. Marin in a re- 
markable article on the origin of species, "L'Origin% des especes" 
(Revue seientifique, Nov. 1901, p. 580). 



ii.] ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 103 

But, if the evolution of life is something other than 
a series of adaptations to accidental circumstances, so 
also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given 
in advance. It is represented, or at least representable, 
before its realization. The complete execution of it 
may be put off to a distant future, or even indefinitely; 
but the idea is none the less formidable at the present 
time, in terms actually given. If, on the contrary, evo- 
lution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as 
it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that 
will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which 
will serve to express it. That is to say that its future 
overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein 
in an idea. 

There is the first error of finalism. It involves another, 
yet more serious. 

If life realizes a plan, it ought to manifest a greater 
harmony the further it advances, just as the house shows 
better and better the idea of the architect as stone is set 
upon stone. If, on the contrary, the unity of life is to be 
found solely in the impetus that pushes it along the road 
of time, the harmony is not in front, but behind. The unity 
is derived from a vis a tergo: it is given at the start as an 
impulsion, not placed at the end as an attraction. In 
communicating itself, the impetus splits up more and more. 
Life, in proportion to its progress, is scattered in mani- 
festations which undoubtedly owe to their common origin 
the fact that they are complementary to each other in 
certain aspects, but which are none the less mutually 
incompatible and antagonistic. So the discord between 
species will go on increasing. Indeed, we have as yet 
only indicated the essential cause of it. We have sup- 
posed, for the sake of simplicity, that each species received 
the impulsion in order to pass it on to others, and that, 



104 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in every direction in which life evolves, the propagation 
is in a straight line. But, as a matter of fact, there are 
species which are arrested; there are some that retrogress. 
Evolution is not only a movement forward; in many cases 
we observe a marking-time, and still more often a deviation 
or turning back. It must be so, as we shall show further 
on, and the same causes that divide the evolution move- 
ment often cause life to be diverted from itself, hypnotized 
by the form it has just brought forth. Thence results an 
increasing disorder. No doubt there is progress, if pro- 
gress mean a continual advance in the general direction 
determined by a first impulsion; but this progress is ac- 
complished only on the two or three great lines of evolution 
on which forms ever more and more complex, ever more 
and more high, appear; between these lines run a crowd 
of minor paths in which, on the contrary, deviations, 
arrests, and set-backs, are multiplied. The philosopher, 
who begins by laying down as a principle that each detail 
is connected with some general plan of the whole, goes from 
one disappointment to another as soon as he comes to 
examine the facts; and, as he had put everything in the 
same rank, he finds that, as the result of not allowing for 
accident, he must regard everything as accidental. For 
accident, then, an allowance must first be made, and a 
very liberal allowance. We must recognize that all is 
not coherent in nature. By so doing, we shall be led to 
ascertain the centres around which the incoherence crystal- 
lizes. This crystallization itself will clarify the rest; 
the main directions will appear, in which life is moving 
whilst developing the original impulse. True, we shall not 
witness the detailed accomplishment of a plan. Nature 
is more and better than a plan in course of realization. 
A plan is a term assigned to a labor: it closes the future 
whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on 



ii.] THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 105 

the contrary, the portals of the future remain wide open. 
It is a creation that goes on for ever in virtue of an initial 
movement. This movement constitutes the unity of 
the organized world — a prolific unity, of an infinite rich- 
ness, superior to any that the intellect could dream of, 
for the intellect is only one of its aspects or products. 

But it is easier to define the method than to apply it. 
The complete interpretation of the evolution movement 
in the past, as we conceive it, would be possible only if 
the history of the development of the organized world 
were entirely known. Such is far from being the case. 
The genealogies proposed for the different species are 
generally questionable. They vary with their authors, 
with the theoretic views inspiring them, and raise dis- 
cussions to which the present state of science does not 
admit of a final settlement. But a comparison of the 
different solutions shows that the controversy bears less 
on the main lines of the movement than on matters of detail ; 
and so, by following the main lines as closely as possible, 
we shall be sure of not going astray. Moreover, they alone 
are important to us ; for we do not aim, like the naturalist, 
at finding the order of succession of different species, but 
only at defining the principal directions of their evolution. 
And not all of these directions have the same interest for 
us: what concerns us particularly is the path that leads 
to man. We shall therefore not lose sight of the fact, 
in following one direction and another, that our main 
business is to determine the relation of man to the animal 
kingdom, and the place of the animal kingdom itself in the 
organized world as a whole. 

To begin with the second point, let us say that no definite 
characteristic distinguishes the plant from the animal. 
Attempts to define the two kingdoms strictly have always 



106 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

come to naught. There is not a single property of vege- 
table life that is not found, in some degree, in certain ani- 
mals; not a single characteristic feature of the animal 
that has not been seen in certain species or at certain 
moments in the vegetable world. Naturally, therefore, 
biologists enamored of clean-cut concepts have regarded 
the distinction between the two kingdoms as artificial. 
They would be right, if definition in this case must be made, 
as in the mathematical and physical sciences, according 
to certain statical attributes which belong to the object 
defined and are not found in any other. Very different, in 
our opinion, is the kind of definition which befits the 
sciences of life. There is no manifestation of life which 
does not contain, in a rudimentary state — either latent 
or potential, — the essential characters of most other mani- 
festations. The difference is in the proportions. But this 
very difference of proportion will suffice to define the group, 
if we can establish that it is not accidental, and that the 
group as it evolves, tends more and more to emphasize these 
particular characters. In a word, the group must not be 
defined by the possession of certain characters, but by its 
tendency to emphasize them. From this point of view, taking 
tendencies rather than states into account, we find that 
vegetables and animals may be precisely defined and 
distinguished, and that they correspond to two divergent 
developments of life. 

This divergence is shown, first, in the method of ali- 
mentation. We know that the vegetable derives directly 
from the air and water and soil the elements necessary 
to maintain life, especially carbon and nitrogen, which it 
takes in mineral form. The animal, on the contrary, 
cannot assimilate these elements unless they have already 
been fixed for it in organic substances by plants, or by 
animals which directly or indirectly owe them to plants; 



H.I THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 107 

so that ultimately the vegetable nourishes the animal. 
True, this law allows of many exceptions among vegetables. 
We do not hesitate to class amongst vegetables the Drosera, 
the Dionaea ; the Pinguicula, which are insectivorous 
plants. On the other hand, the fungi, which occupy so 
considerable a place in the vegetable world, feed like ani- 
mals : whether they are ferments, saprophytes or parasites, 
it is to already formed organic substances that they owe 
their nourishment. It is therefore impossible to draw from 
this difference any static definition such as would auto- 
matically settle in any particular case the question whether 
we are dealing with a plant or an animal. But the difference 
may provide the beginning of a dynamic definition of the 
two kingdoms, in that it marks the two divergent di- 
rections in which vegetables and animals have taken their 
course. It is a remarkable fact that the fungi, which 
nature has spread all over the earth in such extraordinary 
profusion, have not been able to evolve. Organically 
they do not rise above tissues which, in the higher vegetables, 
are formed in the embryonic sac of the ovary, and precede 
the germinative development of the new individual. 1 
They might be called the abortive children of the vege- 
table world. Their different species are like so many blind 
alleys, as if, by renouncing the mode of alimentation custom- 
ary amongst vegetables, they had been brought to a stand- 
still on the highway of vegetable evolution. As to the 
Drosera, the Dionaea, and insectivorous plants in general, 
they are fed by their roots, like other plants ; they too fix, 
by their green parts, the carbon of the carbonic acid in the 
atmosphere. Their faculty of capturing, absorbing and 
digesting insects must have arisen late, in quite exceptional 
cases where the soil was too poor to furnish sufficient nour- 
ishment. In a general way, then, if we attach less im- 

1 De Saporta and Marion, L'Evolution des cryptogames, 1881, p. 37. 



108 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

portance to the presence of special characters than to their 
tendency to develop, and if we regard as essential that 
tendency along which evolution has been able to continue 
indefinitely, we may say that vegetables are distinguished 
from animals by their power of creating organic matter 
out of mineral elements which they draw directly from the 
air and earth and water. But now we come to another 
difference, deeper than this, though not unconnected with it. 
The animal, being unable to fix directly the carbon 
and nitrogen which are everywhere to be found, has to 
seek for its nourishment vegetables which have already 
fixed these elements, or animals which have taken them 
from the vegetable kingdom. So the animal must be 
able to move. From the amoeba, which thrusts out 
its pseudopodia at random to seize the organic matter 
scattered in a drop of water, up to the higher animals 
which have sense-organs with which to recognize their 
prey, locomotor organs to go and seize it, and a nervous 
system to coordinate their movements with their sen- 
sations, animal life is characterized, in its general direction, 
by mobility in space. In its most rudimentary form, the 
animal is a tiny mass of protoplasm enveloped at most 
in a thin albuminous pellicle which allows full freedom for 
change of shape and movement. The vegetable cell, 
on the contrary, is surrounded by a membrane of cellu- 
lose, which condemns it to immobility. And, from the 
bottom to the top of the vegetable kingdom, there are the 
same habits growing more and more sedentary, the plant 
having no need to move, and finding around it, in the air 
and water and soil in which it is placed, the mineral ele- 
ments it can appropriate directly. It is true that phe- 
nomena of movement are seen in plants. Darwin has 
written a well-known work on the movements of climbing 
plants. He studied also the contrivances of certain in- 



ii] THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 109 

sectivorous plants, such as the Drosera and the Dionaea, 
to seize their prey. The leaf-movements of the acacia, 
the sensitive plant, etc., are well known. Moreover, 
the circulation of the vegetable protoplasm within its 
sheath bears witness to its relationship to the protoplasm 
of animals, whilst in a large number of animal species 
(generally parasites) phenomena of fixation, analogous 
to those of vegetables, can be observed. 1 Here, again, 
it would be a mistake to claim that fixity and mobility 
are the two characters which enable us to decide, by simple 
inspection alone, whether we have before us a plant or an 
animal. But fixity, in the animal, generally seems like 
a torpor into which the species has fallen, a refusal to 
evolve further in a certain direction; it is closely akin to 
parasitism and is accompanied by features that recall 
those of vegetable life. On the other hand, the move- 
ments of vegetables have neither the frequency nor the 
variety of those of animals. Generally, they involve only 
part of the organism and scarcely ever extend to the whole. 
In the exceptional cases in which a vague spontaneity 
appears in vegetables, it is as if we beheld the accidental 
awakening of an activity normally asleep. In short, 
although both mobility and fixity exist in the vegetable 
as in the animal world, the balance is clearly in favor of 
fixity in the one case and of mobility in the other. These 
two opposite tendencies are so plainly directive of the two 
evolutions that the two kingdoms might almost be defined 
by them. But fixity and mobility, again, are only super- 
ficial signs of tendencies that are still deeper. 

Between mobility and consciousness there is an obvious 
relationship. No doubt, the consciousness of the higher 
organisms seems bound up with certain cerebral arrange- 

1 On fixation and parasitism in general, see the work of Houssay, 
La Forme et la vie, Paris, 1900, pp. 721-807. 



110 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

ments. The more the nervous system develops, the more 
numerous and more precise become the movements among 
which it can choose; the clearer, also, is the consciousness 
that accompanies them. But neither this mobility nor 
this choice nor consequently this consciousness involves 
as a necessary condition the presence of a nervous system; 
the latter has only canalized in definite directions, and 
brought up to a higher degree of intensity, a rudimentary 
and vague activity, diffused throughout the mass of the 
organized substance. The lower we descend in the ani- 
mal series, the more the nervous centres are simplified, 
and the more, too, they separate from each other, till 
finally the nervous elements disappear, merged in the mass 
of a less differentiated organism. But it is the same with 
all the other apparatus, with all the other anatomical 
elements ; and it would be as absurd to refuse consciousness 
to an animal because it has no brain as to declare it in- 
capable of nourishing itself because it has no stomach. 
The truth is that the nervous system arises, like the other 
systems, from a division of labor. It does not create the 
function, it only brings it to a higher degree of intensity 
and precision by giving it the double form of reflex and 
voluntary activity. To accomplish a true reflex move- 
ment, a whole mechanism is necessary, set up in the spinal 
cord or the medulla. To choose voluntarily between 
several definite courses of action, cerebral centres are 
necessary, that is, crossways from which paths start, 
leading to motor mechanisms of diverse form but equal 
precision. But where nervous elements are not yet canal- 
ized, still less concentrated into a system, there is some- 
thing from which, by a kind of splitting, both the reflex 
and the voluntary will arise, something which has neither 
the mechanical precision of the former nor the intelli- 
gent hesitations of the latter, but which, partaking of 



ii.] THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 111 

both it may be infinitesimally, is a reaction simply unde- 
cided, and therefore vaguely conscious. This amounts 
to saying that the humblest organism is conscious in pro- 
portion to its power to move freely. Is consciousness 
here, in relation to movement, the effect or the cause? 
In one sense it is the cause, since it has to direct loco- 
motion. But in another sense it is the effect, for it is 
the motor activity that maintains it, and, once this activity 
disappears, consciousness dies away or rather falls asleep. 
In crustaceans such as the rhizocephala, which must 
formerly have shown a more differentiated structure, 
fixity and parasitism accompanjr the degeneration and 
almost complete disappearance of the nervous system. 
Since, in such a case, the progress of organization must 
have localized all the conscious activity in nervous centres, 
we may conjecture that consciousness is even weaker in 
animals of this kind than in organisms much less differen- 
tiated, which have never had nervous centres but have 
remained mobile. 

How then could the plant, which is fixed in the earth 
and finds its food on the spot, have developed in the di- 
rection of conscious activity? The membrane of cellulose, 
in which the protoplasm wraps itself up, not only prevents 
the simplest vegetable organism from moving, but screens 
it also, in some measure, from those outer stimuli which 
act on the sensibility of the animal as irritants and prevent 
it from going to sleep. 1 The plant is therefore unconscious. 
Here again, however, we must beware of radical distinctions. 
"Unconscious" and "conscious" are not two labels which 
can be mechanically fastened, the one on every vegetable 
cell, the other on all animals. While consciousness sleeps 
in the animal which has degenerated into a motionless 
parasite, it probably awakens in the vegetable that has 

1 Cope, op. cit. p. 76. 



112 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

regained liberty of movement, and awakens in just the 
degree to which the vegetable has reconquered this liberty. 
Nevertheless, consciousness^ and unconsciousness mark the 
directions in which the two kingdoms have developed, in 
this sense, that to find the best specimens of consciousness 
in the animal we must ascend to the highest representatives 
of the series, whereas, to find probable cases of vegetable 
consciousness, we must descend as low as possible in the 
scale of plants — down to the zoospores of the algae, for 
instance, and, more generally, to those unicellular organ- 
isms which may be said to hesitate between the vegetable 
form and animality. From this standpoint, and in this 
measure, we should define the animal by sensibility and 
awakened consciousness, the vegetable by consciousness 
asleep and by insensibility. 

To sum Up, the vegetable manufactures organic sub- 
stances directly with mineral substances; as a rule, this 
aptitude enables it to dispense with movement and so 
with feeling. Animals, which are obliged to go in search 
of their food, have evolved in the direction of locomotor 
activity, and consequently of a consciousness more and 
more distinct, more and more ample. 

/ Now, it seems to us most probable that the animal 
fcell and the vegetable cell are derived from a common 
'stock, and that the first living organisms oscillated be- 
tween the vegetable and animal form, participating in 
both at once. Indeed, we have just seen that the char- 
acteristic tendencies of the evolution of the two kingdoms, 
although divergent, coexist even now, both in the plant 
and in the animal. The proportion alone differs. Or- 
dinarily, one of the two tendencies covers or crushes down 
the other, but in exceptional circumstances the suppressed 
one starts up and regains the place it had lost. The 



ii] THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 113 

mobility and consciousness of the vegetable cell are not 
so sound asleep that they cannot rouse themselves when 
circumstances permit or demand it ; and, on the other hand, 
the evolution of the animal kingdom has always been re- 
tarded, or stopped, or dragged back, by the tendency it 
has kept toward the vegetative life. However full, how- 
ever overflowing the activity of an animal species may 
appear, torpor and unconsciousness are always lying in 
wait for it. It keeps up its role only by effort, at the 
price of fatigue. Along the route on which the animal 
has evolved, there have been numberless shortcomings 
and cases of decay, generally associated with parasitic 
habits; they are so many shuntings on to the vegetative 
life. Thus, everything bears out the belief that vegetable 
and animal are descended from a common ancestor which 
united the tendencies of both in a rudimentary state. 

But the two tendencies mutually implied in this rudi- 
mentary form became dissociated as they grew. Hence 
the world of plants with its fixity and insensibility, hence 
the animals with their mobility and consciousness. There 
is no need, in order to explain this dividing into two, to 
bring in any mysterious force. It is enough to point out 
that the living being leans naturally toward what is most 
convenient to it, and that vegetables and animals have 
chosen two different kinds of convenience in the way of 
procuring the carbon and nitrogen they need. Vegetables 
continually and mechanically draw these elements from an 
environment that continually provides it. Animals, by 
action that is discontinuous, concentrated in certain 
moments, and conscious, go to find these bodies in organ- 
isms that have already fixed them. They are two different 
ways of being industrious, or perhaps we may prefer to 
say, of being idle. For this very reason we doubt whether 
nervous elements, however rudimentary, will ever be found 



114 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in the plant. What corresponds in it to the directing will 
of the animal is, we believe, the direction in which it bends 
the energy of the solar radiation when it uses it to break 
the connection of the carbon with the oxygen in carbonic 
acid. What corresponds in it to the sensibility of the ani- 
mal is the impressionability, quite of its kind, of its chloro- 
phyl light. Now, a nervous system being pre-eminently 
a mechanism which serves as intermediary between sen- 
sations and volitions, the true "nervous system" of the 
plant seems to be the mechanism or rather chemicism 
sui generis which serves as intermediary between the im- 
pressionability of its chlorophyl to light and the produc- 
ing of starch: which amounts to saying that the plant can 
have no nervous elements, and that the same impetus that 
has led the animal to give itself nerves and nerve centres must 
have ended, in the plant, in the chlorophyllian function. 1 

This first glance over the organized world will enable 
us to ascertain more precisely what unites the two king- 
doms, and also what separates them. 

Suppose, as we suggested in the preceding chapter, 
that at the root of life there is an effort to engraft on to 
the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount 
of indetermination. This effort cannot result in the 
creation of energy, or, if it does, the quantity created 
does not belong to the order of magnitude apprehended 

1 Just as the plant, in certain cases, recovers the faculty of moving 
actively which slumbers in it, so the animal, in exceptional circum- 
stances, can replace itself in the conditions of the vegetative life and 
develop in itself an equivalent of the chlorophyllian function. It 
appears, indeed, from recent experiments of Maria von Linden, that 
the chrysalides and the caterpillars of certain lepidoptera, under the 
influence of light, fix the carbon of the carbonic acid contained in 
the atmosphere (M. von Linden, "L'Assimilation de l'acide carbonique 
par les chrysalides de Lepidopteres," C. R. de la Soc. de biologie, 1905, 
pp. 692 ff.). 



ii.j THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 115 

by our senses and instruments of measurement, our ex- 
perience and science. All that the effort can do, then, is 
to make the best of a pre-existing energy which it finds 
at its disposal. Now, it finds only one way of succeed- 
ing in this, namely, to secure such an accumulation of 
potential energy from matter, that it can get, at any 
moment, the amount of work it needs for its action, simply 
by pulling a trigger. The effort itself possesses only 
that power of releasing. But the work of releasing, 
although always the same and always smaller than any 
given quantity, will be the more effective the heavier 
the weight it makes fall and the greater the height — or, 
in other words, the greater the sum of potential energy 
accumulated and disposable. As a matter of fact, the 
principal source of energy usable on the surface of our 
planet is the sun. So the problem was this: to obtain 
from the sun that it should partially and provisionally 
suspend, here and there, on the surface of the earth, its 
continual outpour of usable energy, and store a certain 
quantity of it, in the form of unused energy, in appropriate 
reservoirs, whence it could be drawn at the desired moment, 
at the desired spot, in the desired direction. The sub- 
stances forming the food of animals are just such reservoirs. 
Made of very complex molecules holding a considerable 
amount of chemical energy in the potential state, they are 
like explosives which only need a spark to set free the energy 
stored within them. Now, it is probable that life tended 
at the beginning to compass at one and the same time both 
the manufacture of the explosive and the explosion by 
which it is utilized. In this case, the same organism that 
had directly stored the energy of the solar radiation 
would have expended it in free movements in space. 
And for that reason we must presume that the first living 
beings sought on the one hand to accumulate, without 



.-.? 



116 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

W 

ceasing, energy borrowed from the sun 7 and on the other 

hand to expend it, in a discontinuous and explosive way, 
in movements of locomotion. Even to-day, perhaps, a 
chlorophyl-beari ng Infusori an such as the Euglena may 
symbolize this primordial tendency of life, though in a 
mean form, incapable of evolving. Is the divergent 
development of the two kingdoms related to what one may 
call the oblivion of each kingdom as regards one of the 
two halves of the programme? Or. rather, which is more 
likely, was the very nature of the matter, that life found 
confronting it on our planet, opposed to the possibility 
of the two tendencies evolving very far together in the same 
organism? What is certain is that the vegetable has 
trended principally in the first direction and the animal 
in the second. But if, from the very first, in making the 
explosive, nature had for object the explosion, then it is 
the evolution of the animal, rather than that of the vege- 
table, that indicates, on the whole, the fundamental di- 
rection of life. 

The "harmony" of the two kingdoms, the comple- 
mentary characters they display, might then be due 
to the fact that they develop two tendencies which at first 
were fused in one. The more the single original tendency 
grows, the harder it finds it to keep united in the same 
living being those two elements which in the rudimentary 
state implied each other. Hence a parting in two, hence 
two divergent evolutions; hence also two series of char- 
acters opposed in certain points, complementary in others, 
but, whether opposed or complementary, always preserving 
an appearance of kinship. While the animal evolved, 
not without accidents along the way, toward a freer and 
freer expenditure of discontinuous energy, the plant per- 
fected rather its system of accumulation without moving. 
We shall not dwell on this second point. Suffice it to 



n.j THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 117 

say that the plant must have been greatly benefited, in 
its turn, by a new division, analogous to that between 
plants and animals. While the primitive vegetable 
cell had to fix by itself both its carbon and its nitrogen, 
it became able almost to give up the second of these two 
functions as soon as microscopic vegetables came forward 
which leaned in this direction exclusively, and even special- 
ized diversely in this still complicated business. The 
microbes that fix the nitrogen of the air and those which 
convert the ammoniacal compounds into nitrous ones, 
and these again into nitrates, have, by the same splitting 
up of a tendency primitively one, rendered to the whole 
vegetable world the same kind of service as the vegetables 
in general have rendered to animals. If a special kingdom 
were to be made for these microscopic vegetables, it might 
be said that in the microbes of the soil, the vegetables 
and the animals, we have before us the analysis, carried 
out by the matter that life found at its disposal on our 
planet, of all that life contained, at the outset, in a state 
of reciprocal implication. Is this, properly speaking, a 
"division of labor"? These words do not give the exact 
idea of evolution, such as we conceive it. Wherever there 
is division of labor, there is association and also convergence 
of effort. Now, the evolution we are speaking of is never 
achieved by means of association, but by dissociation; it 
never tends toward convergence, but toward divergence of 
efforts. The harmony between terms that are mutually 
complementary in certain points is not, in our opinion, 
produced, in course of progress, by a reciprocal adapta- 
tion; on the contrary, it is complete only at the start. 
It arises from an original identity, from the fact that the 
evolutionary process, splaying out -like a sheaf, sunders, 
in proportion to their simultaneous growth, terms which 
at first completed each other so well that they coalesced. 



118 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

Now, the elements into which a tendency splits up 
are far from possessing the same importance, or, above 
all, the same power to evolve. We have just distinguished 
three different kingdoms, if one may so express it, in the 
organized world. While the first comprises only micro- 
organisms which have remained in the rudimentary state, 
animals and vegetables have taken their flight toward 
very lofty fortunes. Such, indeed, is generally the case 
when a tendency divides. Among the divergent develop- 
ments to which it gives rise, some go on indefinitely, others 
come more or less quickly to the end of their tether. These 
latter do not issue directly from the primitive tendency, 
but from one of the elements into which it has divided; 
they are residual developments made and left behind 
on the way by some truly elementary tendency which 
continues to evolve. Now, these truly elementary ten- 
dencies, we think, bear a mark by which they may be 
recognized. 

This mark is like a trace, still visible in each, of what 
was in the original tendency of which they represent the 
elementary directions. The elements of a tendency are 
not like objects set beside each other in space and mutually 
exclusive, but rather like psychic states, each of which, 
although it be itself to begin with, yet partakes of others, 
and so virtually includes in itself the whole personality 
to which it belongs. There is no real manifestation of 
life, we said, that does not show us, in a rudimentary 
or latent state, the characters of other manifestations. 
Conversely, when we meet, on one line of evolution, a 
recollection, so to speak, of what is developed along other 
lines, we must conclude that we have before us dissociated 
elements of one and the same original tendency. In this 
sense, vegetables and animals represent the two great 
divergent developments of life. Though the plant is 



ii.] THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 119 

distinguished from the animal by fixity and insensibility, 
movement and consciousness sleep in it as recollections 
which may waken. But, beside these normally sleeping 
recollections, there are others awake and active, just those, 
namely, whose activity does not obstruct the development 
of the elementary tendency itself. We may then formulate 
this law: When a tendency splits up in the course of its 
development, each of the special tendencies which thus arise 
tries to preserve and develop everything in the primitive 
tendency that is not incompatible with the work for which 
it is specialized. This explains precisely the fact we 
dwelt on in the preceding chapter, viz., the formation 
of identical complex mechanisms on independent lines 
of evolution. Certain deep-seated analogies between 
the animal and the vegetable have probably no other 
cause: sexual generation is perhaps only a luxury for 
the plant, but to the animal it was a necessity, and the 
plant must have been driven to it by the same impetus 
which impelled the animal thereto, a primitive, original 
impetus, anterior to the separation of the two kingdoms. 
The same may be said of the tendency of the vegetable 
* towards a growing complexity. This tendency is essential 
to the animal kingdom, ever tormented by the need of 
more and more extended and effective action. But the 
vegetable, condemned to fixity and insensibility, exhibits 
the same tendency only because it received at the outset 
the same impulsion. Recent experiments show that it 
varies at random when the period of "mutation" arrives; 
whereas the animal must have evolved, we believe, in 
much more definite directions. But we will not dwell 
further on this original doubling of the modes of life. Let 
us come to the evolution of animals, in which we are more 
particularly interested. 



120 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

What constitutes animality, we said, is the faculty 
of utilizing a releasing mechanism for the conversion 
of as much stored-up potential energy as possible into 
" explosive" actions. In the beginning the explosion 
is haphazard, and does not choose its direction. Thus 
the amoeba thrusts out its pseudopodic prolongations 
in all directions at once. But, as we rise in the animal 
scale, the form of the body itself is observed to indicate 
a certain number of very definite directions along which 
the energy travels. These directions are marked by so 
many chains of nervous elements. Now, the nervous 
element has gradually emerged from the barely differentiat- 
ed mass of organized tissue. It may, therefore, be sur- 
mised that in the nervous element, as soon as it appears, 
and also in its appendages, the faculty of suddenly freeing 
the gradually stored-up energy is concentrated. No doubt, 
every living cell expends energy without ceasing, in order 
to maintain its equilibrium. The vegetable cell, torpid 
from the start, is entirely absorbed in this work of main- 
tenance alone, as if it took for end what must at first have 
been only a means. But, in the animal, all points to action, 
that is, to the utilization of energy for movements from 
place to place. True, every animal cell expends a good 
deal — often the whole — of the energy at its disposal in 
keeping itself alive; but the organism as a whole tries 
to attract as much energy as possible to those points where 
the locomotive movements are effected. So that where a 
nervous system exists, with its complementary sense- 
organs and motor apparatus, everything should happen 
as if the rest of the body had, as its essential function, to 
prepare for these and pass on to them, at the moment 
required, that force which they are to liberate by a sort 
of explosion. 

The part played by food amongst the higher animals 



ii.] ANIMAL LIFE 121 

is, indeed, extremely complex. In the first place it serves 
to repair tissues, then it provides the animal with the 
heat necessary to render it as independent as possible 
of changes in external temperature. Thus it preserves, 
supports, and maintains the organism in which the nervous 
system is set and on which the nervous elements have to 
five. But these nervous elements would have no reason 
for existence if the organism did not pass to them, and 
especially to the muscles they control, a certain energy 
to expend; and it may even be conjectured that there, 
in the main, is the essential and ultimate destination of 
food. This does not mean that the greater part of the food 
is used in this work. A state may have to make enormous 
expenditure to secure the return of taxes, and the sum 
which it will have to dispose of, after deducting the cost 
of collection, will perhaps be very small: that sum is, 
none the less, the reason for the tax and for all that has 
been spent to obtain its return. So it is with the energy 
which the animal demands of its food. 

Many facts seem to indicate that the nervous and mus- 
cular elements stand in this relation towards the rest of 
the organism. Glance first at the distribution of ali- 
mentary substances among the different elements of the 
living body. These substances fall into two classes, one 
the quaternary or albuminoid, the other the ternary, 
including the carbohydrates and the fats. The albumi- 
noids are properly plastic, destined to repair the tissues — 
although, owing to the carbon they contain, they are 
capable of providing energy on occasion. But the function 
of supplying energy has devolved more particularly on 
the second class of substances: these, being deposited 
in the cell rather than forming part of its substance, 
convey to it, in the form of chemical potential, an ex- 
pansive energy that may be directly converted into either 



122 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

movement or heat. In short, the chief function of the 
albuminoids is to repair the machine, while the function 
of the other class of substances is to supply power. It 
is natural that the albuminoids should have no specially 
allotted destination, since every part of the machine has 
to be maintained. But not so with the other substances. 
The carbohydrates are distributed very unequally, and 
this inequality of distribution seems to us in the highest 
degree instructive. 

Conveyed by the arterial blood in the form of glucose, 
these substances are deposited, in the form of glycogen, 
in the different cells forming the tissues. We know that 
one of the principal functions of the liver is to maintain 
at a constant level the quantity of glucose held by the 
blood, by means of the reserves of glycogen secreted by the 
hepatic cells. Now, in this circulation of glucose and 
accumulation of glycogen, it is easy to see that the effect 
is as if the whole effort of the organism were directed 
towards providing with potential energy the elements of 
both the muscular and the nervous tissues. The organ- 
ism proceeds differently in the two cases, but it arrives 
at the same result. In the first case, it provides the muscle- 
cell with a large reserve deposited in advance : the quantity 
of glycogen contained in the muscles is, indeed, enormous 
in comparison with what is found in the other tissues. 
In the nervous tissue, on the contrary, the reserve is 
small (the nervous elements, whose function is merely 
to liberate the potential energy stored in the muscle, never 
have to furnish much work at one time) ; but the remark- 
able thing is that this reserve is restored by the blood at 
the very moment that it is expended, so that the nerve 
is instantly recharged with potential energy. Muscular 
tissue and nervous tissue are, therefore, both privileged, 
the one in that it is stocked with a large reserve of energy, 



ii.l ANIMAL LIFE 123 

the other in that it is always served at the instant it is in 
need and to the exact extent of its requirements. 

More particularly, it is from the sensori-motor system 
that the call for glycogen, the potential energy, comes, 
as if the rest of the organism were simply there in order 
to transmit force to the nervous system and to the muscles 
which the nerves control. True, when we think of the 
part played by the nervous system (even the sensori- 
motor system) as regulator of the organic life, it may well 
be asked whether, in this exchange of good offices between 
it and the rest of the body, the nervous system is indeed 
a master that the body serves. But we shall already in- 
cline to this hypothesis when we consider, even in the 
static state only, the distribution of potential energy 
among the tissues; and we shall be entirely convinced of it 
when we reflect upon the conditions in which the energy 
is expended and restored. For suppose the sensori- 
motor system is a system like the others, of the same rank 
as the others. Borne by the whole of the organism, it will 
wait until an excess of chemical potential is supplied 
to it before it performs any work. In other words, it 
is the production of glycogen which will regulate the 
consumption by the nerves and muscles. On the con- 
trary, if the sensori-motor system is the actual master, 
the duration and extent of its action will be independent, 
to a certain extent at least, of the reserve of glycogen that 
it holds, and even of that contained in the whole of the 
organism. It will perform work, and the other tissues 
will have to arrange as they can to supply it with potential 
energy. Now, this is precisely what does take place, as is 
shown in particular by the experiments of Morat and Du- 
fourt. 1 While the glycogenic function of the liver depends 
on the action of the excitory nerves which control it, the 

1 Archives de physiologie, 1892. 



124 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

action of these nerves is subordinated to the action of 
those which stimulate the locomotor muscles — in this 
sense, that the muscles begin by expending without cal- 
culation, thus consuming glycogen, impoverishing the 
blood of its glucose, and finally causing the liver, which 
has had to pour into the impoverished blood some of 
its reserve of glycogen, to manufacture a fresh supply. 
From the sensori-motor system, then, everything starts; 
on that system everything converges; and we may say, 
without metaphor, that the rest of the organism is at its 
service. 

Consider again what happens in a prolonged fast. It 
is a remarkable fact that in animals that have died of 
hunger the brain is found to be almost unimpaired, while 
the other organs have lost more or less of their weight 
and their cells have undergone profound changes. 1 It 
seems as though the rest of the body had sustained the 
nervous system to the last extremity, treating itself 
simply as the means of which the nervous system is the 
end. 

To sum up: if we agree, in short, to understand by 
"the sensori-motor system" the cerebro-spinal nervous 
system together with the sensorial apparatus in which it 
is prolonged and the locomotor muscles it controls, we 
may say that a higher organism is essentially a sensori- 
motor system installed on systems of digestion, respiration, 
circulation, secretion, etc., whose function it is to repair, 
cleanse and protect it, to create an unvarying internal 
environment for it, and above all to pass it potential 

1 De Manaceme, "Quelques observations experimentales sur Pin- 
fluence de l'insomnie absolue" (Arch. ital. de biologie, t. xxi., 1894, pp. 
322 ff.). Recently, analogous observations have been made on a man 
who died of inanition after a fast of thirty-five days. See, on this 
subject, in the Annee biologique of 1898, p. 338, the r£sum6 of an article 
(in Russian) by Tarakevitch and Stchasny. 



ii.] ANIMAL LIFE 125 

energy to convert into locomotive movement. 1 It is 
true that the more the nervous function is perfected, the 
more must the functions required to maintain it develop, and 
the more exacting, consequently, they become for them- 
selves. As the nervous activity has emerged from the 
protoplasmic mass in which it was almost drowned, it 
has had to summon around itself activities of all kinds for 
its support. These could only be developed on other 
activities, which again implied others, and so on indefinitely. 
Thus it is that the complexity of functioning of the higher 
organisms goes on to infinity. The study of one of these 
organisms therefore takes us round in a circle, as if every- 
thing was a means to everything else. But the circle 
has a centre, none the less, and that is the system of nervous 
elements stretching between the sensory organs and the 
motor apparatus. 

We will not dwell here on a point we have treated at 
length in a former work. Let us merely recall that the 
progress of the nervous system has been effected both 
in the direction of a more precise adaptation of movements 
and in that of a greater latitude left to the living being 
to choose between them. These two tendencies may 
appear antagonistic, and indeed they are so ; but a nervous 
chain, even in its most rudimentary form, successfully 
reconciles them. On the one hand, it marks a well-de- 

1 Cuvier said: "The nervous system is, at bottom, the whole animal; 
the other systems are there only to serve it." ("Sur un nouveau 
rapprochement a etablir entre les classes qui composent le regne ani- 
mal," Arch, du Museum d'histoire naturelle, Paris, 1812, pp. 73-84.) 
Of course, it would be necessary to apply a great many restrictions 
to this formula — for example, to allow for the cases of degradation 
and retrogression in which the nervous system passes into the back- 
ground. And, moreover, with the nervous system must be included 
the sensorial apparatus on the one hand and the motor on the other, 
between which it acts as intermediary. Cf . Foster, art. ' ' Physiology," 
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edinburgh, 1885, p. 17. 



126 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

fined track between one point of the periphery and an- 
other, the one sensory, the other motor. It has therefore 
canalized an activity which was originally diffused in the 
protoplasmic mass. But, on the other hand, the elements 
that compose it are probably discontinuous; at any rate, 
even supposing they anastomose, they exhibit a functional 
discontinuity, for each of them ends in a kind of cross- 
road where probably the nervous current may choose 
its course. From the humblest Monera to the best endowed 
insects, and up to the most intelligent vertebrates, the 
progress realized has been above all a progress of the nervous 
system, coupled at every stage with all the new construc- 
tions and complications of mechanism that this progress 
required. As we foreshadowed in the beginning of this 
work, the role of life is to insert some indetermination into 
matter. Indeterminate, i.e. unforeseeable, are the forms 
it creates in the course of its evolution. More and more 
indeterminate also, more and more free, is the activity 
to which these forms serve as the vehicle. A nervous 
system, with neurones placed end to end in such wise that, 
at the extremity of each, manifold ways open in which 
manifold questions present themselves, is a veritable 
reservoir of indetermination. That the main energy of 
the vital impulse has been spent in creating apparatus 
of this kind is, we believe, what a glance over the organ- 
ized world as a whole easily shows. But concerning the 
vital impulse itself a few explanations are necessary. 

It must not be forgotten that the force which is evolv- 
ing throughout the organized world is a limited force, 
which is always seeking to transcend itself and always 
remains inadequate to the work it would fain produce. 
The errors and puerilities of radical finalism are due to 
the misapprehension of this point. It has represented 



ii.] DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 127 

the whole of the living world as a construction, and a 
construction analogous to a human work. All the pieces 
have been arranged with a view to the best possible func- 
tioning of the machine. Each species has its reason for 
existence, its part to play, its allotted place; and all join 
together, as it were, in a musical concert, wherein the 
seeming discords, are really meant to bring out a funda- 
mental harmony. In short, all goes on in nature as in 
the works of human genius, where, though the result 
may be trifling, there is at least perfect adequacy between 
the object made and the work of making it. 

Nothing of the kind in the evolution of life. There, 
the disproportion is striking between the work and the 
result. From the bottom to the top of the organized 
world we do indeed find one great effort; but most often 
this effort turns short, sometimes paralyzed by contrary 
forces, sometimes diverted from what it should do by 
what it does, absorbed by the form it is engaged in tak- 
ing, hypnotized by it as by a mirror. Even in its most 
perfect works, though it seems to have triumphed over 
external resistances and also over its own, it is at the 
mercy of the materiality which it has had to assume. 
It is what each of us may experience in himself. Our 
freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, 
creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to 
renew itself by a constant effort : it is dogged by automa- 
tism. The most living thought becomes frigid in the for- 
mula that expresses it. The word turns against the 
idea. 

The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusi- 
asm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturally 
congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, 
the one takes so easily the s^fape of the other, that we 
might confuse them together, doubt our own sincerity, 



128 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

deny goodness and love, if we did not know that the dead 
retain for a time the features of the living. 

The profound cause of this discordance lies in an ir- 
remediable difference of rhythm. Life in general is mo- 
bility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this 
mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is 
always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution 
in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special 
evolution is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised 
by the wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves, 
borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore 
relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well 
that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a 
progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their 
form is only the outline of a movement. At times, how- 
ever, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears 
them is materialized before our eyes. We have this 
sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal 
love, so striking, and in most animals so touching, ob- 
servable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. 
This love, in which some have seen the great mystery 
of life, may possibly deliver us life's secret. It shows us 
each generation leaning over the generation that shall 
follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living 
being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of 
life is in the movement by which life is transmitted. 

This contrast between life in general, and the forms 
in which it is manifested, has everywhere the same char- 
acter. It might be said that life tends toward the ut- 
most possible action, but that each species prefers to 
contribute the slightest possible effort. Regarded in what 
constitutes its true essence, namely, as a transition from 
species to species, life is a continually growing action. 
But each of the species, through which life passes, aims 



ii.] DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 129 

only at its own convenience. It goes for that which 
demands the least labor. Absorbed in the form it is 
about to take, it falls into a partial sleep, in which it 
ignores almost all the rest of life; it fashions itself so 
as to take the greatest possible advantage of its immediate 
environment with the least possible trouble. Accord- 
ingly, the act by which life goes forward to the creation 
of a new form, and the act by which this form is shaped, 
are two different and often antagonistic movements. 
The first is continuous with the second, but cannot con- 
tinue in it without being drawn aside from its direction, 
as would happen to a man leaping, if, in order to clear 
the obstacle, he had to turn his eyes from it and look at 
himself all the while. 

Living forms are, by their very definition, forms that 
are able to live. In whatever way the adaptation of the 
organism to its circumstances is explained, it has necessa- 
rily been sufficient, since the species has subsisted. In 
this sense, each of the successive species that paleon- 
tology and zoology describes was a success carried off by 
life. But we get a very different impression when we 
refer each species to the movement that has left it behind 
on its way, instead of to the conditions into which it has 
been set. Often this movement has turned aside; very 
often, too, it has stopped short; what was to have been 
a thoroughfare has become a terminus. From this new 
point of view, failure seems the rule, success exceptional 
and always imperfect. We shall see that, of the four 
main directions along which animal life bent its course, 
two have led to blind alleys, and, in the other two, the 
effort has generally been out of proportion to the result. 

Documents are lacking to reconstruct this history in 
detail, but we can make out its main lines. We have 
already said that animals and vegetables must have 



130 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

separated soon from their common stock, the vegetable 
falling asleep in immobility, the animal, on the con- 
trary, becoming more and more awake and marching on 
to the conquest of a nervous system. Probably the effort 
of the animal kingdom resulted in creating organisms 
still very simple, but endowed with a certain freedom 
of action, and, above all, with a shape so undecided that 
it could lend itself to any future determination. These 
animals may have resembled some of our worms, but 
with this difference, however, that the worms living to- 
day, to which they could be compared, are but the empty 
and fixed examples of infinitely plastic forms, pregnant 
with an unlimited future, the common stock of the echino- 
derms, molluscs, arthropods, and vertebrates. 

One danger lay in wait for them, one obstacle which 
might have stopped the soaring course of animal life. 
There is one peculiarity with which we cannot help 
being struck when glancing over the fauna of primitive 
times, namely, the imprisonment of the animal in a more 
or less solid sheath, which must have obstructed and 
often even paralyzed its movements. The molluscs 
of that time had a shell more universally than those of 
to-day. The arthropods in general were provided with a 
carapace; most of them were crustaceans. The more 
ancient fishes had a bony sheath of extreme hardness. 1 
The explanation of this general fact should be sought, 
we believe, in a tendency of soft organisms to defend 
themselves against one another by making themselves, 
as far as possible, undevourable. Each species, in the act 
by which it comes into being, trends towards that which 
is most expedient. Just as among primitive organisms 
there were some that turned towards animal life by re- 

1 See, on these different points, the work of Gaudry, Essai de palion- 
tologie philosophique, Paris, 1896, pp. 14-16 and 78-79. 



hi DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 131 

fusing to manufacture organic out of inorganic material 
and taking organic substances ready made from organ- 
isms that had turned toward the vegetative life, so, among 
the animal species themselves, many contrived to live 
at the expense of other animals. For an organism that is 
animal, that is to say mobile, can avail itself of its mobility 
to go in search of defenseless animals, and feed on them 
quite as well as on vegetables. So, the more species be- 
came mobile, the more they became voracious and danger- 
ous to one another. Hence a sudden arrest of the entire 
animal world in its progress towards higher and higher 
mobility; for the hard and calcareous skin of the echino- 
derm, the shell of the mollusc, the carapace of the crustacean 
and the ganoid breast-plate of the ancient fishes probably 
all originated in a common effort of the animal species 
to protect themselves against hostile species. But this 
breast-plate, behind which the animal took shelter, 
constrained it in its movements and sometimes fixed 
it in one place. If the vegetable renounced consciousness 
in wrapping itself in a cellulose membrane, the animal 
that shut itself up in a citadel or in armor condemned 
itself to a partial slumber. In this torpor the echinoderms 
and even the molluscs live to-day. Probably arthropods 
and vertebrates were threatened with it too. They escaped, 
however, and to this fortunate circumstance is due the 
expansion of the highest forms of life. 

In two directions, in fact, we see the impulse of life 
to movement getting the upper hand again. The fishes 
exchanged their ganoid breast-plate for scales. Long 
before that, the insects had appeared, also disencumbered 
of the breast-plate that had protected their ancestors. 
Both supplemented the insufficiency of their protective 
covering by an agility that enabled them to escape their 
enemies, and also to assume the offensive, to choose the 



132 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

place and the moment of encounter. We see a progress 
of the same kind in the evolution of human armaments. 
The first impulse is to seek shelter; the second, which is 
the better, is to become as supple as possible for flight and 
above all for attack — attack being the most effective 
means of defense. So the heavy hoplite was supplanted 
by the legionary; the knight, clad in armor, had to give 
place to the light free-moving infantryman; and in a 
general way, in the evolution of life, just as in the evo- 
lution of human societies and of individual destinies, the 
greatest successes have been for those who have accepted 
the heaviest risks. 

Evidently, then, it was to the animal's interest to 
make itself more mobile. As we said when speaking 
of adaptation in general, any transformation of a species 
can be explained by its own particular interest. This 
will give the immediate cause of the variation, but often 
only the most superficial cause. The profound cause is 
the impulse which thrust life into the world, which made 
it divide into vegetables and animals, which shunted the 
animal on to suppleness of form, and which, at a certain 
moment, in the animal kingdom threatened with torpor, 
secured that, on some points at least, it should rouse itself 
up and move forward. 

On the two paths along which the vertebrates and 
arthropods have separately evolved, development (apart 
from retrogressions connected with parasitism or any 
other cause) has consisted above all in the progress of 
the sensori-motor nervous system. Mobility and sup- 
pleness were sought for, and also — through many experi- 
mental attempts, and not without a tendency to excess 
of substance and brute force at the start — variety of move- 
ments. But this quest itself took place in divergent 
directions. A glance at the nervous system of the arthro- 



ii] DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 133 

pods and that of the vertebrates shows us the difference. 
In the arthropods, the body is formed of a series more or 
less long of rings set together; motor activity is thus 
distributed amongst a varying — sometimes a considerable 
— number of appendages, each of which has its special 
function. In the vertebrates, activity is concentrated 
in two pairs of members only, and these organs perform 
functions which depend much less strictly on their form. 1 
The independence becomes complete in man, whose hand 
is capable of any kind of work. 

That, at least, is what we see. But behind what is 
seen there is what may be surmised — two powers, im- 
manent in life and originally intermingled, which were 
bound to part company in course of growth. 

To define these powers, we must consider, in the evo- 
lution both of the arthropods and the vertebrates, the 
species which mark the culminating point of each. How 
is this point to be determined? Here again, to aim at 
geometrical precision will lead us astray. There is no 
single simple sign by which we can recognize that one 
species is more advanced than another on the same line 
of evolution. There are manifold characters, that must 
be compared and weighed in each particular case, in order 
to ascertain to what extent they are essential or acci- 
dental and how far they must be taken into account. 

It is unquestionable, for example, that success is the 
most general criterion of superiority, the two terms being, 
up to a certain point, synonymous. By success must be 
understood, so far as the living being is concerned, an 
aptitude to develop in the most diverse environments, 
through the greatest possible variety of obstacles, so as to 
cover the widest possible extent of ground. A species 

1 See, on this subject, Shaler, The Individual, New York, 1900, pp. 
118-125. 



134 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 'chap. 

which claims the entire earth for its domain is truly a 
dominating and consequently superior species. Such 
is the human species, which represents the culminating 
point of the evolution of the vertebrates. But such also 
are, in the series of the articulate, the insects and in partic- 
ular certain hymenoptera. It has been said of the ants 
that, as man is lord of the soil, they are lords of the sub-soil. 

On the other hand, a group of species that has appeared 
late may be a group of degenerates; but, for that, some 
special cause of retrogression must have intervened. 
By right, this group should be superior to the group from 
which it is derived, since it would correspond to a more 
advanced stage of evolution. Now man is probably 
the latest comer of the vertebrates; 1 and in the insect 
series no species is later than the hymenoptera, unless 
it be the lepidoptera, which are probably degenerates, 
living parasitically on flowering plants. 

So, by different ways, we are led to the same conclusion. 
The evolution of the arthropods reaches its culminating 
point in the insect, and in particular in the hymenoptera, 
as that of the vertebrates in man. Now, since instinct 
is nowhere so developed as in the insect world, and in no 
group of insects so marvelously as in the hymenoptera, it 
may be said that the whole evolution of the animal king- 
dom, apart from retrogressions towards vegetative life, 
has taken place on two divergent paths, one of which led 
to instinct and the other to intelligence. 

1 This point is disputed by M. Ren6 Quinton, who regards the car- 
nivorous and ruminant mammals, as well as certain birds, as subse- 
quent to man (R. Quinton, L'Eau de mer milieu organique, Paris, 1904, 
p. 435). We may say here that our general conclusions, although 
very different from M. Quinton's, are not irreconcilable with them; 
for if evolution has really been such as we represent it, the vertebrates 
must have made an effort to maintain themselves in the most favor- 
able conditions of activity — the very conditions, indeed, which life 
had chosen in the beginning. 



ii.] DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 135 

Vegetative torpor, instinct, and intelligence — these, 
then, are the elements that coincided in the vital impulsion 
common to plants and animals, and which, in the course 
of a development in which they were made manifest in 
the most unforeseen forms, have been dissociated by the 
very fact of their growth. The cardinal error which, from 
Aristotle onwards, has vitiated most of the philosophies of 
nature, is to see in vegetative, instinctive and rational life, 
three successive degrees of the development of one and the 
same tendency, whereas they are three divergent directions 
of an activity that has split up as it grew. The difference 
between them is not a difference of intensity, nor, more 
generally, of degree, but of kind. 

It is important to investigate this point. We have 
seen in the case of vegetable and animal life how they 
are at once mutually complementary and mutually an- 
tagonistic. Now we must show that intelligence and 
instinct also are opposite and complementary. But 
let us first explain why we are generally led to regard 
them as activities of which one is superior to the other 
and based upon it, whereas in reality they are not things 
of the same order: they have not succeeded one another, 
nor can we assign to them different grades. 

It is because intelligence and instinct, having origin- 
been interpenetrating, retain something of their 
common origin. Neither is ever found in a pure state. 
We said that in the plant the consciousness and mobility 
of the animal, which lie dormant, can be awakened; and 
that the animal lives under the constant menace of being 
drawn aside to the vegetative life. The two tendencies 
— that of the plant and that of the animal — were so thor- 
oughly interpenetrating, to begin with, that there has 
never been a complete severance between them: they 



"ally 



136 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

haunt each other continually; everywhere we find them 
mingled; it is the proportion that differs. So with in- 
telligence and instinct. There is no intelligence in which 
some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more 
especially no instinct that is not surrounded with a 
fringe of intelligence. It is this fringe of intelligence 
that has been the cause of so many misunderstandings. 
From the fact that instinct is always more or less in- 
telligent, it has been concluded that instinct and intelligence 
are things of the same kind, that there is only a difference 
of complexity or perfection between them, and, above all, 
that one of the two is expressible in terms of the other. 
In reality, they accompany each other only because they 
are complementary, and they are complementary only 
because ihey are different, what is instinctive in instinct 
being opposite to what is intelligent in intelligence. 

We are bound to dwell on this point. It is one of the 
utmost importance. 

Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are- 
going to make will be too sharply drawn, just because we 
wish to define in instinct what is instinctive, and in intelli- 
gence what is intelligent, whereas all concrete instinct is 
mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is pene- 
trated by instinct. Moreover, neither intelligence nor 
instinct lends itself to rigid definition : they are tendencies, 
and not things. Also, it must not be forgotten that in the 
present chapter we are considering intelligence and instinct 
as going out of life which deposits them along its course. 
Now the life manifested by an organism is, in our view, 
a certain effort to obtain certain things from the material 
world. No wonder, therefore, if it is the diversity of this 
effort that strikes us in instinct and intelligence, and if 
we see in these two modes of psychical activity, above 
all else, two different methods of action on inert matter. 



ii.] INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 137 

This rather narrow view of them has the advantage of 
giving us an objective means of distinguishing them. In 
return, however, it gives us, of intelligence in general 
and of instinct in general, only the mean position above and 
below which both constantly oscillate. For that reason 
the reader must expect to see in what follows only a dia- 
grammatic drawing, in which the respective outlines 
of intelligence and instinct are sharper than they should 
be, and in which the shading-off which comes from the 
indecision of each and from their reciprocal encroachment 
on one another is neglected. In a matter so obscure, 
we cannot strive too hard for clearness. It will always be 
easy afterwards to soften the outlines and to correct what 
is too geometrical in the drawing — in short, to replace 
the rigidity of a diagram by the suppleness of life. 

To what date is it agreed to ascribe the appearance 
of man on the earth? To the period when the first 
weapons, the first tools, were made. The memorable 
quarrel over the discovery of Boucher de Perthes in the 
quarry of Moulin-Quignon is not forgotten. The question 
was whether real hatchets had been found or merely 
bits of flint accidentally broken. But that, supposing 
they were hatchets, we were indeed in the presence of 
intelligence, and more particularly of human intelligence, 
no one doubted for an instant. Now let us open a col- 
lection of anecdotes on the intelligence of animals: we 
shall see that besides many acts explicable by imitation 
or by the automatic association of images, there are some 
that we do not hesitate to call intelligent : foremost among 
them are those that bear witness to some idea of manu- 
facture, whether the animal life succeeds in fashioning a 
crude instrument or uses for its profit an object made by 
man. The animals that rank immediately after man in 



138 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

the matter of intelligence, the apes and elephants, are 
those that can use an artificial instrument occasionally. 
Below, but not very far from them, come those that 
recognize a constructed object: for example, the fox, which 
knows quite well that a trap is a trap. No doubt, there is 
intelligence wherever there is inference; but inference, 
which consists in an inflection of past experience in the 
direction of present experience, is already a beginning 
of invention. Invention becomes complete when it is 
materialized in a manufactured instrument. Towards 
that achievement the intelligence of animals tends as 
towards an ideal. And though, ordinarily, it does not 
yet succeed in fashioning artificial objects and in making 
use of them, it is preparing for this by the very variations 
which it performs on the instincts furnished by nature. 
As regards human intelligence, it has not been sufficiently 
noted that mechanical invention has been from the first 
its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravi- 
tates around the manufacture and use of artificial instru- 
ments, that the inventions which strew the road of progress 
have also traced its direction. This we hardly realize, 
because it takes us longer to change ourselves than to 
change our tools. Our individual and even social habits 
survive a good while the circumstances for which they were 
made, so that the ultimate effects of an invention are not 
observed until its novelty is already out of sight. A 
century has elapsed since the invention of the steam- 
engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths 
of the shock it gave us. But the revolution it has effected 
in industry has nevertheless upset human relations al- 
together. New ideas are arising, new feelings are on the 
way to flower. In thousands of years, when, seen from 
the distance, only the broad lines of the present age will 
still be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for 



ii-l INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 139 

little, even supposing they are remembered at all; but the 
steam-engine, and the procession of inventions of every 
kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we 
speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre-historic 
times: it will serve to define an age. 1 If we could rid our- 
selves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly 
to what the historic and the prehistoric periods show us 
to be the constant characteristic of man and of intelli- 
gence, we should say not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber. 
In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its 
original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial 
objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely 
varying the manufacture. 

Now, does an unintelligent animal also possess tools 
or machines? Yes, certainly, but here the instrument 
forms a part of the body that uses it; and, correspond- 
ing to this instrument, there is an instinct that knows how 
to use it. True, it cannot be maintained that all instincts 
consist in a natural ability to use an inborn mechanism. 
Such a definition would not apply to the instincts which 
Romanes called "secondary"; and more than one "pri- 
mary" instinct would not come under it. But this defi- 
nition, like that which we have provisionally given of 
intelligence, determines at least the ideal limit toward 
which the very numerous forms of instinct are traveling. 
Indeed, it has often been pointed out that most instincts 
are only the continuance, or rather the consummation, 
of the work of organization itself. Where does the activity 
of instinct begin? and where does that of nature end? We 
cannot tell. In the metamorphoses of the larva into the 
nymph and into the perfect insect, metamorphoses that 

1 M. Paul Lacombe has laid great stress on the important influence 
that great inventions have exercised on the evolution of humanity (P. 
Lacombe, De I'histoire considers comme science, Paris, 1894. See, in 
particular, pp. 168-247). 



140 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

often require appropriate action and a kind of initiative 
on the part of the larva, there is no sharp line of demarca- 
tion between the instinct of the animal and the organizing 
work of living matter. We may say, as we will, either that 
instinct organizes the instruments it is about to use, or 
that the process of organization is continued in the instinct 
that has to use the organ. The most marvelous instincts 
of the insect do nothing but develop its special structure 
into movements: indeed, where social life divides the 
labor among different individuals, and thus allots them 
different instincts, a corresponding difference of structure 
is observed: the polymorphism of ants, bees, wasps and 
certain pseudoneuroptera is well known. Thus, if we 
consider only those typical cases in which the complete 
triumph of intelligence and of instinct is seen, we find 
this essential difference between them: instinct perfected 
is a faculty of using and even of constructing organized 
instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making 
and using unorganized instruments. 

The advantages and drawbacks of these two modes 
of activity are obvious. Instinct finds the appropriate 
instrument at hand: this instrument, which makes and 
repairs itself, which presents, like all the works of nature, 
an infinite complexity of detail combined with a marvelous 
simplicity of function, does at once, when required, what 
it is called upon to do, without difficulty and with a per- 
fection that is often wonderful. In return, it retains an 
almost invariable structure, since a modification of it 
involves a modification of the species. Instinct is there- 
fore necessarily specialized, being nothing but the utili- 
zation of a specific instrument for a specific object. The 
instrument constructed intelligently, on the contrary, 
is an imperfect instrument. It costs an effort. It is 
generally troublesome to handle. But, as it is made of 



ill INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 141 

unorganized matter, it can take any form whatsoever, 
serve any purpose, free the living being from every new 
difficulty that arises and bestow on it an unlimited number 
of powers. Whilst it is inferior to the natural instrument 
for the satisfaction of immediate wants, its advantage 
over it is the greater, the less urgent the need. Above 
all, it reacts on the nature of the being that constructs 
it; for in calling on him to exercise a new function, it 
confers on him, so to speak, a richer organization, being 
an artificial organ by which the natural organism is ex- 
tended. For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new 
need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of 
action within which the animal tends to move auto- 
matically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into 
which it is driven further and further, and made more 
and more free. But this advantage of intelligence over 
instinct only appears at a late stage, when intelligence, 
having raised construction to a higher degree, proceeds 
to construct constructive machinery. At the outset, the 
advantages and drawbacks of the artificial instrument and of 
the natural instrument balance so well that it is hard to fore- 
tell which of the two will secure to the living being the 
greater empire over nature. 

We may surmise that they began by being implied 
in each other, that the original psychical activity included 
both at once, and that, if we went far enough back into the 
past, we should find instincts more nearly approaching 
intelligence than those of our insects, intelligence nearer 
to instinct than that of our vertebrates, intelligence and 
instinct being, in this elementary condition, prisoners of a 
matter which they are not yet able to control. If the force 
immanent in life were an unlimited force, it might perhaps 
have developed instinct and intelligence together, and to 
any extent, in the same organisms. But everything seems 



142 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap 

to indicate that this force is limited, and that it soon 
exhausts itself in its very manifestation. It is hard for 
it to go far in several directions at once: it must choose. 
Now, it has the choice between two modes of acting on 
the material world: it can either effect this action directly 
by creating an organized instrument to work with; or else 
it can effect it indirectly through an organism which, in- 
stead of possessing the required instrument naturally, 
will itself construct it by fashioning inorganic matter. 
Hence intelligence and instinct, which diverge more and 
more as they develop, but which never entirely separate 
from each other. On the one hand, the most perfect 
instinct of the insect is accompanied by gleams of intelli- 
gence, if only in the choice of place, time and materials 
of construction: the bees, for example, when by exception 
they build in the open air, invent new and really intelligent 
arrangements to adapt themselves to such new con- 
ditions. 1 But, on the other hand, intelligence has even 
more need of instinct than instinct has of intelligence; 
for the power to give shape to crude matter involves al- 
ready a superior degree of organization, a degree to which 
the animal could not have risen, save on the wings of 
instinct. So, while nature has frankly evolved in the di- 
rection of instinct in the arthropods, we observe in almost 
all the vertebrates the striving after rather than the ex- 
pansion of intelligence. It is instinct still which forms 
the basis of their psychical activity; but intelligence is 
there, and would fain supersede it. Intelligence does not 
yet succeed in inventing instruments; but at least it tries 
to, by performing as many variations as possible on the 
instinct which it would like to dispense with. It gains 
complete self-possession only in man, and this triumph 

1 Bouvier, "La Nidification des abeilles a l'air libre'-' (C. R. de I' At. 
des sciences, 7 mai 1906). 



ii.] INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 143 

is attested by the very insufficiency of the natural means 
at man's disposal for defense against his enemies, against 
cold and hunger. This insufficiency, when we strive to 
fathom its significance, acquires the value of a prehistoric 
document; it is the final leave-taking between intelli- 
gence and instinct. But it is no less true that nature 
must have hesitated between two modes of psychical 
activity — one assured of immediate success, but limited 
in its effects; the other hazardous, but whose conquests, 
if it should reach independence, might be extended in- 
definitely. Here again, then, the greatest success was 
achieved on the side of the greatest risk. Instinct and 
intelligence therefore represent two divergent solutions, 
equally fitting, of one and the same problem. 

There ensue, it is true, profound differences of internal 
structure between instinct and intelligence. We shall 
dwell only on those that concern our present study. Let 
us say, then, that instinct and intelligence imply two 
radically different kinds of knowledge. But some ex- 
planations are first of all necessary on the subject of con- 
sciousness in general. 

It has been asked how far instinct is conscious. Our 
reply is that there are a vast number of differences and 
degrees, that instinct is more or less conscious in certain 
cases, unconscious in others. The plant, as we shall see, 
has instincts; it is not likely that these are accompanied 
by feeling. Even in the animal there is hardly any com- 
plex instinct that is not unconscious in some part at least 
of its exercise. But here we must point out a difference, 
not often noticed, between two kinds of unconsciousness, 
viz., that in which consciousness is absent, and that in which 
consciousness is nullified. Both are equal to zero, but in 
one case the zero expresses the fact that there is nothing, 
in the other that we have two equal quantities of opposite 



144 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

sign which compensate and neutralize each other. The 
unconsciousness of a falling stone is of the former kind: 
the stone has no feeling of its fall. Is it the same with 
the unconsciousness of instinct, in the extreme cases in 
which instinct is unconscious? When we mechanically 
perform an habitual action, when the somnambulist 
automatically acts his dream, unconsciousness may be 
absolute; but this is merely due to the fact that the re- 
presentation of the act is held in check by the performance 
of the act itself, which resembles the idea so perfectly, 
and fits it so exactly, that consciousness is unable to find 
room between them. Representation is stopped up by 
action. The proof of this is, that if the accomplishment 
of the act is arrested or thwarted by an obstacle, con- 
sciousness may reappear. It was there, but neutralized 
by the action which fulfiled and thereby filled the repre- 
sentation. The obstacle creates nothing positive; it simply 
makes a void, removes a stopper. This inadequacy of act to 
representation is precisely what we here call consciousness. 
If we examine this point more closely, we shall find 
that consciousness is the light that plays around the 
zone of possible actions or potential activity which sur- 
rounds the action really performed by the living being. 
It signifies hesitation or choice. Where many equally 
possible actions are indicated without there being any real 
action (as in a deliberation that has not come to an end), 
consciousness is intense. Where the action performed 
is the only action possible (as in activity of the somnam- 
bulistic or more generally automatic kind), consciousness 
is reduced to nothing. Representation and knowledge 
exist none the less in the case if we find a whole series of 
systematized movements the last of which is already pre- 
figured in the first, and if, besides, consciousness can flash 
out of them at the shock of an obstacle. From this point 



hi INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 145 

of view, the consciousness of a living being may be defined as 
an arithmetical difference between potential and real activity. 
It measures the interval between representation and action. 

It may be inferred from this that intelligence is likely 
to point towards consciousness, and instinct towards un- 
consciousness. For, where the implement to be used is 
organized by nature, the material furnished by nature, 
and the result to be obtained willed by nature, there is 
little left to choice; the consciousnesss inherent in the 
representation is therefore counterbalanced, whenever it 
tends to disengage itself, by the performance of the act, 
identical with the representation, which forms its counter- 
weight. Where consciousness appears, it does not so 
much light up the instinct itself as the thwartings to which 
instinct is subject; it is the deficit of instinct, the distance, 
between the act and the idea, that becomes consciousness 
so that consciousness, here, is only an accident. Es- 
sentially, consciousness only emphasizes the starting- 
point of instinct, the point at which the whole series of 
automatic movements is released. Deficit, on the con- 
trary, is the normal state of intelligence. Laboring under 
difficulties is its very essence. Its original function being 
to construct unorganized instruments, it must, in spite 
of numberless difficulties, choose for this work the place 
and the time, the form and the matter. And it can never 
satisfy itself entirely, because every new satisfaction 
creates new needs. In short, while instinct and intelli- 
gence both involve knowledge, this knowledge is rather 
acted and unconscious in the case of instinct, thought and 
conscious in the case of intelligence. But it is a difference 
rather of degree than of kind. So long as consciousness 
is all we are concerned with, we close our eyes to what is, 
from the psychological point of view, the cardinal difference 
between instinct and intelligence. 



146 GREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

In order to get at this essential difference we must, 
without stopping at the more or less brilliant light which 
illumines these two modes of internal activity, go straight 
to the two objects, profoundly different from each other, 
upon which instinct and intelligence are directed. 

When the horse-fly lays its eggs on the legs or shoulders 
of the horse, it acts as if it knew that its larva has to develop 
in the horse's stomach and that the horse, in licking itself, 
will convey the larva into its digestive tract. When a 
paralyzing wasp stings its victim on just those points 
where the nervous centres lie, so as to render it motionless 
without killing it, it acts like a learned entomologist and a 
skilful surgeon rolled into one. But what shall we say of 
the little beetle, the Si£aris, whose story is so often quoted? 
This insect lays its eggs at the entrance of the under- 
ground passages dug by a kind of bee, the Anthophora. 
Its larva, after long waiting, springs upon the male Antho- 
phora as it goes out of the passage, clings to it, and re- 
mains attached until the "nuptial flight," when it seizes 
the opportunity to pass from the male to the female, and 
quietly waits until it lays its eggs. It then leaps on the egg, 
which serves as a support for it in the honey, devours the 
egg in a few days, and, resting on the shell, undergoes its 
first metamorphosis. Organized now to float on the honey, 
it consumes this provision of nourishment, and becomes 
a nymph, then a perfect insect. Everything happens as 
if the larva of the Sitaris, from the moment it was hatched, 
knew that the male Anthophora would first emerge from 
the passage; that the nuptial flight would give it the means 
of conveying itself to the female, who would take it to a 
store of honey sufficient to feed it after its transformation; 
that, until this transformation, it could gradually eat 
the egg of the Anthophora, in such a way that it could 
at the same time feed itself, maintain itself at the surface 



ii] INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 147 

of the honey, and also suppress the rival that otherwise 
would have come out of the egg. And equally all this 
happens as if the Sitaris itself knew that its larva would 
know all these things. The knowledge, if knowledge there 
be, is only implicit. It is reflected outwardly in exact 
movements instead of being reflected inwardly in conscious- 
ness. It is none the less true that the behavior of the insect 
involves, or rather evolves, the idea of definite things 
existing or being produced in definite points of space 
and time, which the insect knows without having learned 
them. 

Now, if we look at intelligence from the same point 
of view, we find that it also knows certain things with- 
out having learned them. But the knowledge in the 
two cases is of a very different order. We must be careful 
here not to revive again the old philosophical dispute 
on the subject of innate ideas. So we will confine our- 
selves to the point on which every one is agreed, to wit, 
that the young child understands immediately things that 
the animal will never understand, and that in this sense 
intelligence, like instinct, is an inherited function, there- 
fore an innate one. But this innate intelligence, although 
it is a faculty of knowing, knows no object in particular. 
When the new-born babe seeks for the first time its mother's 
breast, so showing that it has knowledge (unconscious, 
no doubt) of a thing it has never seen, we say, just because 
the innate knowledge is in this case of a definite object, 
that it belongs to instinct and not to intelligence. Intelli- 
gence does not then imply the innate knowledge of any 
object. And yet, if intelligence knows nothing by nature, 
it has nothing innate. What, then, if it be ignorant of 
all things, can it know? Besides things, there are relations. 
The new-born child, so far as intelligent, knows neither 
definite objects nor a definite property of any object; 



148 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

but when, a little later on, he will hear an epithet being 
applied to a substantive, he will immediately understand 
what it means. The relation of attribute to subject is 
therefore seized by him naturally, and the same might be 
said of the general relation expressed by the verb, a re- 
lation so immediately conceived by the mind that language 
can leave it to be understood, as is instanced in rudimentary 
languages which have no verb. Intelligence, therefore, 
naturally makes use of relations of like with like, of con- 
tent to container, of cause to effect, etc., which are implied 
in every phrase in which there is a subject, an attribute and 
a verb, expressed or understood. May one say that it has 
innate knowledge of each of these relations in particular? 
It is for logicians to discover whether they are so many 
irreducible relations, or whether they can be resolved 
into relations still more general. But, in whatever way 
we make the analysis of thought, we always end with one 
or several general categories, of which the mind possesses 
innate knowledge since it makes a natural use of them. 
Let us say, therefore, that whatever, in instinct and intelli- 
gence, is innate knowledge, bears in the first case on things 
and in the second on relations. 

Philosophers distinguish between the matter of our 
knowledge and its form. The matter is what is given 
by the perceptive faculties taken in the elementary state. 
The form is the totality of the relations set up between 
these materials in order to constitute a systematic know- 
ledge. Can the form, without matter, be an object of 
knowledge? Yes, without doubt, provided that this 
knowledge is not like a thing we possess so much as like 
a habit we have contracted, — a direction rather than a 
state: it is, if we will, a certain natural bent of attention. 
The schoolboy, who knows that the master is going to 
dictate a fraction to him, draws a line before he knows 



ii.] INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 149 

what numerator and what denominator are to come; he 
therefore has present to his mind the general relation be- 
tween the two terms although he does not know either of 
them; he knows the form without the matter. So is it, 
prior to experience, with the categories into which our 
experience comes to be inserted. Let us adopt then words 
sanctioned by usage, and give the distinction between 
intelligence and instinct this more precise formula: In- 
telligence, in so far as it is innate, is the knowledge of a form; 
instinct implies the knowledge of a matter. 

From this second point of view, which is that of know- 
ledge instead of action, the force immanent in life in general 
appears to us again as a limited principle, in which origin- 
ally two different and even divergent modes of knowing 
coexisted and intermingled. The first gets at definite 
objects immediately, in their materiality itself. It says, 
"This is what is." The second gets at no object in particu- 
lar; it is only a natural power of relating an object to an 
object, or a part to a part, or an aspect to an aspect — in 
short, of drawing conclusions when in possession of the 
premisses, of proceeding from what has been learnt to 
what is still unknown. It does not say, "This is;" it 
says only that "if the conditions are such, such will be the 
conditioned." In short, the first kind of knowledge, the 
instinctive, would be formulated in what philosophers 
call categorical propositions, while the second kind, the 
intellectual, would always be expressed hypothetically. 
Of these two faculties, the former seems, at first, much 
preferable to the other. And it would be so, in truth, if it 
extended to an endless number of objects. But, in fact, 
it applies only to one special object, and indeed only to a 
restricted part of that object. Of this, at least, its know- 
ledge is intimate and full; not explicit, but implied in the 
accomplished action. The intellectual faculty, on the 



150 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

contrary, possesses naturally only an external and empty 
knowledge; but it has thereby the advantage of supplying 
a frame in which an infinity of objects may find room in 
turn. It is as if the force evolving in living forms, being a 
limited force, had had to choose between two kinds of 
limitation in the field of natural or innate knowledge, 
one applying to the extension of knowledge, the other to 
its intension. In the first case, the knowledge may be 
packed and full, but it will then be confined to one specific 
object; in the second, it is no longer limited by its object, 
but that is because it contains nothing, being only a form 
without matter. The two tendencies, at first implied 
in each other, had to separate in order to grow. They 
both went to seek their fortune in the world, and turned 
out to be instinct and intelligence. 

Such, then, are the two divergent modes of knowledge 
by which intelligence and instinct must be defined, from 
the standpoint of knowledge rather than that of action. 
But knowledge and action are here only two aspects of 
one and the same faculty. It is easy to see, indeed, that 
the second definition is only a new form of the first. 

If instinct is, above all, the faculty of using an organized 
natural instrument, it must involve innate knowledge 
(potential or unconscious, it is true), both of this instru- 
ment and of the object to which it is applied. Instinct 
is therefore innate knowledge of a thing. But intelligence 
is the faculty of constructing unorganized — that is to say 
artificial — instruments. If, on its account, nature gives 
up endowing the living being with the instruments that may 
serve him, it is in order that the living being may be able 
to vary his construction according to circumstances. The 
essential function of intelligence is therefore to see the way 
out of a difficulty in any circumstances whatever, to find 
what is most suitable, what answers best the question 



ii.] INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 151 

asked. Hence it bears essentially on the relations between 
a given situation and the means of utilizing it. What is 
innate in intellect, therefore, is the tendency to establish 
relations, and this tendency implies the natural know- 
ledge of certain very general relations, a kind of stuff 
that the activity of each particular intellect will cut up 
into more special relations. Where activity is directed 
toward manufacture, therefore, knowledge necessarily 
bears on relations. But this entirely formal knowledge 
of intelligence has an immense advantage over the material 
knowledge of instinct. A form, just because it is empty, 
may be filled at will with any number of things in turn, 
even with those that are of no use. So that a formal 
knowledge is not limited to what is practically useful, al- 
though it is in view of practical utility that it has made 
its appearance in the world. An intelligent being bears 
within himself the means to transcend his own nature. 

He transcends himself, however, less than he wishes, 
less also than he imagines himself to do. The purely 
formal character of intelligence deprives it of the ballast 
necessary to enable it to settle itself on the objects that 
are of the most powerful interest to speculation. Instinct, 
on the contrary, has the desired materiality, but it is 
incapable of going so far in quest of its object; it does not 
speculate. Here we reach the point that most concerns 
our present inquiry. The difference that we shall now 
proceed to denote between instinct and intelligence is 
what the whole of this analysis was meant to bring out. 
We formulate it thus: There are things that intelligence 
alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. 
These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek 
them. 

It is necessary here to consider some preliminary de- 
tails that concern the mechanism of intelligence. We 



152 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

have said that the function of intelligence is to establish 
relations. Let us determine more precisely the nature 
of these relations. On this point we are bound to be either 
vague or arbitrary so long as we see in the intellect a faculty 
intended for pure speculation. We are then reduced to 
taking the general frames of the understanding for some- 
thing absolute, irreducible and inexplicable. The under- 
standing must have fallen from heaven with its form, 
as each of us is born with his face. This form may be 
defined, of course, but that is all; there is no asking why 
it is what it is rather than anything else. Thus, it will be 
said that the function of the intellect is essentially uni- 
fication, that the common object of all its operations is to 
introduce a certain unity into the diversity of phenomena, 
and so forth. But, in the first place, "unification" is a 
vague term, less clear than "relation" or even "thought," 
and says nothing more. And, moreover, it might be asked 
if the function of intelligence is not to divide even more 
than to unite. Finally, if the intellect proceeds as it does 
because it wishes to unite, and if it seeks unification simply 
because it has need of unifying, the whole of our knowledge 
becomes relative to certain requirements of the mind 
that probably might have been entirely different from 
what they are: for an intellect differently shaped, know- 
ledge would have been different. Intellect being no longer 
dependent on anything, everything becomes dependent 
on it; and so, having placed the understanding too high, 
we end by putting too low the knowledge it gives us. 
Knowledge becomes relative, as soon as the intellect is 
made a kind of absolute. — We regard the human intellect, 
on the contrary, as relative to the needs of action. Postu- 
late action, and the very form of the intellect can be deduced 
from it. This form is therefore neither irreducible nor 
inexplicable. And, precisely because it is not independent, 



ii.! INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 153 

knowledge cannot be said to depend on it: knowledge 
ceases to be a product of the intellect and becomes, in a 
certain sense, part and parcel of reality. 

Philosophers will reply that action takes place in an 
ordered world, that this order is itself thought, and that 
we beg the question when we explain the intellect by action, 
which presupposes it. They would be right if our point 
of view in the present chapter was to be our final one. 
We should then be dupes of an illusion like that of Spencer, 
who believed that the intellect is sufficiently explained as 
the impression left on us by the general characters of matter: 
as if the order inherent in matter were not intelligence 
itself! But we reserve for the next chapter the question 
up to what point and with what method philosophy can 
attempt a real genesis of the intellect at the same time 
as of matter. For the moment, the problem that engages 
our attention is of a psychological order. We are asking 
what is the portion of the material world to which our in- 
tellect is specially adapted. To reply to this question, 
there is no need to choose a system of philosophy: it is 
enough to take up the point of view of common sense. 

Let us start, then, from action, and lay down that 
the intellect aims, first of all, at constructing. This 
fabrication is exercised exclusively on inert matter, in 
this sense, that even if it makes use of organized material, 
it treats it as inert, without troubling about the life which 
animated it. And of inert matter itself, fabrication deals 
only with the solid; the rest escapes by its very fluidity. 
If, therefore, the tendency of the intellect is to fabricate, 
we may expect to find that whatever is fluid in the real 
will escape it in part, and whatever is life in the living will 
escape it altogether. Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands 
of nature, has for its chief object the unorganized solid. 

When we pass in review the intellectual functions, 



154 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

we see that the intellect is never quite at its ease, never 
entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert 
matter, more particularly upon solids. What is the most 
general property of the material world? It is extended: 
it presents to us objects external to other objects, and, in 
these objects, parts external to parts. No doubt, it is 
useful to us, in view of our ulterior manipulation, to regard 
each object as divisible into parts arbitrarily cut up, each 
part being again divisible as we like, and so on ad infinitum. 
But it is above all necessary, for our present manipulation, 
to regard the real object in hand, or the real elements into 
which we have resolved it, as provisionally final, and to 
treat them as so many units. To this possibility of de- 
composing matter as much as we please, and in any way 
we please, we allude when we speak of the continuity of 
material extension; but this continuity, as we see it, is 
nothing else but our ability, an ability that matter allows 
to us to choose the mode of discontinuity we shall find in 
it. It is always, in fact, the mode of discontinuity once 
chosen that appears to us as the actually real one and 
that which fixes our attention, just because it rules our 
action. Thus discontinuity is thought for itself; it is 
thinkable in itself; we form an idea of it by a positive 
act of our mind; while the intellectual representation of 
continuity is negative, being, at bottom, only the refusal 
of our mind, before any actually given system of decompo- 
sition, to regard it as the only possible one. Of the 
discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea. 

On the other hand, the objects we act on are certainly 
mobile objects, but the important thing for us to know is 
whither the mobile object is going and where it is at any 
moment of its passage. In other words, our interest is 
directed, before all, to its actual or future positions, and 
not to the progress by which it passes from one position 



ii.] THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 155 

to another, progress which is the movement itself. In 
our actions, which are systematized movements, what we 
fix our mind on is the end or meaning of the movement, 
its design as a whole — in a word, the immobile plan of its 
execution. That which really moves in action interests 
us only so far as the whole can be advanced, retarded, or 
stopped by any incident that may happen on the way. 
From mobility itself our intellect turns aside, because it 
has nothing to gain in dealing with it. If the intellect were 
meant for pure theorizing, it would take its place within 
movement, for movement is reality itself, and immobility 
is always only apparent or relative. But the intellect 
is meant for something altogether different. Unless it 
does violence to itself, it takes the opposite course; it 
always starts from immobility, as if this were the ultimate 
reality : when it tries to form an idea of movement, it 
does so by constructing movement out of immobilities 
put together. This operation, whose illegitimacy and danger 
in the field of speculation we shall show later on (it leads 
to dead-locks, and creates artificially insoluble philosophical 
problems), is easily justified when we refer it to its proper 
goal. Intelligence, in its natural state, aims at a practically 
useful end. When it substitutes for movement immobilities 
put together, it does not pretend to reconstitute the move- 
ment such as it actually is; it merely replaces it with a 
practical equivalent. It is the philosophers who are mis- 
taken when they import into the domain of speculation 
a method of thinking which is made for action. But of 
this more anon. Suffice it now to say that to the stable 
and unchangeable our intellect is attached by virtue of 
its natural disposition. Of immobility alone does the in- 
tellect form a clear idea. 

Now, fabricating consists in carving out the form of 
an object in matter. What is the most important is 



156 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

the form to be obtained. As to the matter, we choose 
that which is most convenient; but, in order to choose 
it, that is to say, in order to go and seek it among many 
others, we must have tried, in imagination at least, to 
endow every kind of matter with the form of the object 
conceived. In other words, an intelligence which aims 
at fabricating is an intelligence which never stops at the 
actual form of things nor regards it as final, but, on the 
contrary, looks upon all matter as if it were carvable at 
will. Plato compares the good dialectician to the skilful 
cook who carves the animal without breaking its bones, 
by following the articulations marked out by nature. 1 
An intelligence which always proceeded thus would really 
be an intelligence turned toward speculation. But 
action, and in particular fabrication, requires the opposite 
mental tendency: it makes us consider every actual 
form of things, even the form of natural things, as artificial 
and provisional; it makes our thought efface from the object 
perceived, even though organized and living, the lines 
that outwardly mark its inward structure; in short, it 
makes us regard its matter as indifferent to its form. The 
whole of matter is made to appear to our thought as an 
immense piece of cloth in which we can cut out what we 
will and sew it together again as we please. Let us note, 
in passing, that it is this power that we affirm when we say 
that there is a space, that is to say, a homogeneous and 
empty medium, infinite and infinitely divisible, lending 
itself indifferently to any mode of decomposition whatso- 
ever. A medium of this kind is never perceived ; it is only 
conceived. What is perceived is extension colored, re- 
sistant, divided according to the lines which mark out the 
boundaries of real bodies or of their real elements. But 
when we think of our power over this matter, that is to say, 

1 Plato, Phaearus, 265 b. 



ii.] THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 157 

of our faculty of decomposing and recomposing it as we 
please, we project the whole of these possible decompositions 
and recompositions behind real extension in the form of a 
homogeneous space, empty and indifferent, which is 
supposed to underlie it. This space is therefore, pre- 
eminently, the plan of our possible action on things, al- 
though, indeed, things have a natural tendency, as we 
shall explain further on, to enter into a frame of this 
kind. It is a view taken by mind. The animal has 
probably no idea of it, even when, like us, it perceives ex- 
tended things. It is an idea that symbolizes the tendency 
of the human intellect to fabrication. But this point 
must not detain us now. Suffice it to say that the intellect 
is characterized by the unlimited power of decomposing ac- 
cording to any law and of recomposing into any system. 

We have now enumerated a few of the essential features 
of human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered 
the individual in isolation, without taking account of social 
life. In reality, man is a being who lives in society. If 
it be true that the human intellect aims at fabrication, we 
must add that, for that as well as for other purposes, it is 
associated with other intellects. Now, it is difficult to 
imagine a society whose members do not communicate by 
signs. Insect societies probably have a language, and this 
language must be adapted, like that of man, to the neces- 
sities of life in common. By language community of action 
is made possible. But the requirements of joint action 
are not at all the same in a colony of ants and in a human 
society. In insect societies there is generally polymor- 
phism, the subdivision of labor is natural, and each indi- 
vidual is riveted by its structure to the function it performs. 
In any case, these societies are based on instinct, and con- 
sequently on certain actions or fabrications that are more 
or less dependent on the form of the organs. So if the ants, 



158 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

for instance, have a language, the signs which compose 
it must be very limited in number, and each of them, once 
the species is formed, must remain invariably attached to a 
certain object or a certain operation: the sign is adherent 
to the thing signified. In human society, on the contrary, 
fabrication and action are of variable form, and, moreover, 
each individual must learn his part, because he is not 
preordained to it by his structure. So a language is re- 
quired which makes it possible to be always passing from 
what is known to what is yet to be known. There must 
be a language whose signs — which cannot be infinite in 
number — are extensible to an infinity of things. This 
tendency of the sign to transfer itself from one object to 
another is characteristic of human language. It is ob- 
servable in the little child as soon as he begins to speak. 
Immediately and naturally he extends the meaning of 
the words he learns, availing himself of the most accidental 
connection or the most distant analogy to detach and 
transfer elsewhere the sign that had been associated in 
his hearing with a particular object. "Anything can 
designate anything;" such is the latent principle of 
infantine language. This tendency has been wrongly 
confused with the faculty of generalizing. The animals 
themselves generalize; and, moreover, a sign — even 
an instinctive sign — always to some degree represents 
a genus. But what characterizes the signs of human 
language is not so much their generality as their mobility. 
The instinctive sign is adherent, the intelligent sign is 
mobile. 

Now, this mobility of words, that makes them able 
to pass from one thing to another, has enabled them to 
be extended from things to ideas. Certainly, language 
would not have given the faculty of reflecting to an in- 
telligence entirely externalized and incapable of turn- 



ii.] THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 159 

ing homeward. An intelligence which reflects is one 
that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over 
and above practically useful efforts. It is a conscious- 
ness that has virtually reconquered itself. But still the 
virtual has to become actual. Without language, in- 
telligence would probably have remained riveted to the 
material objects which it was interested in considering. 
It would have lived in a state of somnambulism, outside 
itself, hypnotized on its own work. Language has greatly 
contributed to its liberation. The word, made to pass 
from one thing to another, is, in fact, by nature transferable 
and free. It can therefore be extended, not only from one 
perceived thing to another, but even from a perceived thing 
to a recollection of that thing, from the precise recollection 
to a more fleeting image, and finally from an image fleet- 
ing, though still pictured, to the picturing of the act by 
which the image is pictured, that is to say, to the idea. 
Thus is revealed to the intelligence, hitherto always turned 
outwards, a whole internal world — the spectacle of its 
own workings. It required only this opportunity, at 
length offered by language. It profits by the fact that the 
word is an external thing, which the intelligence can catch 
hold of and cling to, and at the same time an immaterial 
thing, by means of which the intelligence can penetrate 
even to the inwardness of its own work. Its first business 
was indeed to make instruments, but this fabrication is 
possible only by the employment of certain means which 
are not cut to the exact measure of their object, but go 
beyond it and thus allow intelligence a supplementary — 
that is to say disinterested work. From the moment that 
the intellect, reflecting upon its own doings, perceives itself 
as a creator of ideas, as a faculty of representation in 
general, there is no object of which it may not wish to have 
the idea, even though that object be without direct re- 



160 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

lation to practical action. That is why we said there are 
things that intellect alone can seek. Intellect alone, 
indeed, troubles itself about theory; and its theory would 
fain embrace everything — not only inanimate matter, 
over which it has a natural hold, but even life and 
thought. 

By what means, what instruments, in short by what 
method it will approach these problems, we can easily 
guess. Originally, it was fashioned to the form of matter. 
Language itself, which has enabled it to extend its field 
of operations, is made to designate things, and nought but 
things: it is only because the word is mobile, because it 
flies from one thing to another, that the intellect was sure 
to take it, sooner or later, on the wing, while it was not 
settled on anything, and apply it to an object which is 
not a thing and which, concealed till then, awaited the 
coming of the word to pass from darkness to light. But 
the word, by covering up this object, again converts it 
into a thing. So intelligence, even when it no longer 
operates upon its own object, follows habits it has con- 
tracted in that operation: it applies forms that are indeed 
those of unorganized matter. It is made for this kind of 
work. With this kind of work alone is it fully satisfied. 
And that is what intelligence expresses by saying that thus 
only it arrives at distinctness and clearness. 

It must, therefore, in order to think itself clearly and 
distinctly, perceive itself under the form of discontinuity. 
Concepts, in fact, are outside each other, like objects in 
space; and they have the same stability as such objects, 
on which they have been modeled. Taken together, 
they constitute an "intelligible world," that resembles 
the world of solids in its essential characters, but whose 
elements are lighter, more diaphanous, easier for the 
intellect to deal with than the image of concrete things: 



ii.] THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 161 

they are not, indeed, the perception itself of things, but 
the representation of the act by which the intellect is 
fixed on them. They are, therefore, not images, but 
symbols. Our logic is the complete set of rules that must 
be followed in using symbols. As these symbols are de- 
rived from the consideration of solids, as the rules for com- 
bining these symbols hardly do more than express the most 
general relations among solids, our logic triumphs in that 
science which takes the solidity of bodies for its object, 
that is, in geometry. Logic and geometry engender each 
other, as we shall see a little further on. It is from the 
extension of a certain natural geometry, suggested by the 
most general and immediately perceived properties of 
solids, that natural logic has arisen; then from this natural 
logic, in its turn, has sprung scientific geometry, which 
extends further and further the knowledge of the external 
properties of solids. 1 Geometry and logic are strictly 
applicable to matter; in it they are at home, and in it 
they can proceed quite alone. But, outside this domain, 
pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, 
which is an altogether different thing. 

Thus, all the elementary forces of the intellect tend 
to transform matter into an instrument of action, that 
is, in the etymological sense of the word, into an organ. 
Life, not content with producing organisms, would fain 
give them as an appendage inorganic matter itself, con- 
verted into an immense organ by the industry of the living 
being. Such is the initial task it assigns to intelligence. 
That is why the intellect always behaves as if it were 
fascinated by the contemplation of inert matter. It is 
life looking outward, putting itself outside itself, adopting 
the ways of unorganized nature in principle, in order to 
direct them in fact. Hence its bewilderment when it 
1 We shall return to these points in the next chapter. 



162 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

turns to the living and is confronted with organization. 
It does what it can, it resolves the organized into the un- 
organized, for it cannot, without reversing its natural 
direction and twisting about on itself, think true continuity, 
real mobility, reciprocal penetration — in a word, that 
creative evolution which is life. 

Consider continuity. The aspect of life that is accessible 
to our intellect — as indeed to our senses, of which our 
intellect is the extension — is that which offers a hold to 
our action. Now, to modify an object, we have to perceive 
it as divisible and discontinuous. From the point of view 
of positive science, an incomparable progress was realized 
when the organized tissues were resolved into cells. The 
study of the cell, in its turn, has shown it to be an organism 
whose complexity seems to grow, the more thoroughly 
it is examined. The more science advances, the more 
it sees the number grow of heterogeneous elements which 
are placed together, outside each other, to make up a 
living being. Does science thus get any nearer to life? 
Does it not, on the contrary, find that what is really life 
in the living seems to recede with every step by which 
it pushes further the detail of the parts combined? There 
is indeed already among scientists a tendency to regard 
the substance of the organism as continuous, and the cell 
as an artificial entity. 1 But, supposing this view were 
finally to prevail, it could only lead, on deeper study, to 
some other mode of analyzing of the living being, and so to 
a new discontinuity — although less removed, perhaps, 
from the real continuity of life. The truth is that this 
continuity cannot be thought by the intellect while it 
follows its natural movement. It implies at once the 
multiplicity of elements and the interpenetration of 
all by all, two conditions that can hardly be reconciled 
1 We shall return to this point in chapter iii., p. 259. 



hi THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 163 

in the field in which our industry, and consequently our 
intellect, is engaged. 

Just as we separate in space, we fix in time. The in- 
tellect is not made to think evolution, in the proper sense 
of the word — that is to say, the continuity of a change 
that is pure mobility. We shall not dwell here on this 
point, which we propose to study in a special chapter. 
Suffice it to say that the intellect represents becoming as 
a series of states, each of which is homogeneous with itself 
and consequently does not change. Is our attention 
called to the internal change of one of these states? At 
once we decompose it into another series of states which, 
reunited, will be supposed to make up this internal modi- 
fication. Each of these new states must be invariable, 
or else their internal change, if we are forced to notice 
it, must be resolved again into a fresh series of invariable 
states, and so on to infinity. Here again, thinking con- 
sists in reconstituting, and, naturally, it is with given 
elements, and consequently with stable elements, that we 
reconstitute. So that, though we may do our best to 
imitate the mobility of becoming by an addition that is 
ever going on, becoming itself slips through our fingers just 
when we think we are holding it tight. 

Precisely because it is always trying to reconstitute, 
and to reconstitute with what is given, the intellect lets 
what is new in each moment of a history escape. It 
does not admit the unforeseeable. It rejects all creation. 
That definite antecedents bring forth a definite consequent, 
calculable as a function of them, is what satisfies our 
intellect. That a definite end calls forth definite means 
to attain it, is what we also understand. In both cases 
we have to do with the known which is combined with the 
known, in short, with the old which is repeated. Our 
intellect is there at its ease; and, whatever be the object, 



164 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

it will abstract, separate, eliminate, so as to substitute for 
the object itself, if necessary, an approximate equivalent 
in which things will happen in this way. But that each 
instant is a fresh endowment, that the new is ever upspring- 
ing, that the form just come into existence (although, 
when once produced, it may be regarded as an effect de- 
termined by its causes) could never have been foreseen — 
because the causes here, unique in their kind, are part of 
the effect, have come into, existence with it, and are de- 
termined by it as much as they determine it — all this we 
can feel within ourselves and also divine, by sympathy, 
outside ourselves, but we cannot think it, in the strict sense 
of the word, nor express it in terms of pure understanding. 
No wonder at that: we must remember what our intellect 
is meant for. The causality it seeks and finds everywhere 
expresses the very mechanism of our industry, in which 
we go on recomposing the same whole with the same parts, 
repeating the same movements to obtain the same result. 
The finality it understands best is the finality of our in- 
dustry, in which we work on a model given in advance, that 
is to say, old or composed of elements already known. As 
to invention properly so called, which is, however, the point 
of departure of industry itself, our intellect does not 
succeed in grasping it in its upspringing, that is to say, 
in its indivisibility, nor in its fervor, that is to say, in 
its creativeness. Explaining it always consists in re- 
solving it, it the unforeseeable and new, into elements 
old or known, arranged in a different order. The intellect 
can no more admit complete novelty than real becoming; 
that is to say, here again it lets an essential aspect of life 
escape, as if it were not intended to think such an object. 
All our analyses bring us to this conclusion. But it 
is hardly necessary to go into such long details concerning 
the mechanism of intellectual working; it is enough to 



ii.] THE FUNCTION OF THE INTELLECT 165 

consider the results: We see that the intellect, so skilful 
in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches 
the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body 
or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiff- 
ness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for 
such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches 
us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, 
urgent and constant need we have to preserve our bodies 
and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to each 
of us, in this field, to experiment continually on ourselves 
and on others, of the palpable injury by which the wrong- 
ness of a medical or pedagogical practise is both made 
manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stu- 
pidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We 
may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy with 
which we treat the living like the lifeless and think all 
reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply defined 
solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the 
immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterized by a 
natural inability to comprehend life. 

Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form 
of life. While intelligence treats everything mechanically, 
instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the con- 
sciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were 
wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into 
action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up 
to us the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries 
out further the work by which life organizes matter — 
so that we cannot say, as has often been shown, where 
organization ends and where instinct begins. When the 
little chick is breaking its shell with a peck of its beak, 
it is acting by instinct, and yet it does but carry on the 
movement which has borne it through embryonic life. 



166 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

Inversely, in the course of embryonic life itself (especially 
when the embryo lives freely in the form of a larva), many 
of the acts accomplished must be referred to instinct. 
The most essential of the primary instincts are really, 
therefore, vital processes. The potential consciousness 
that accompanies them is generally actualized only at the 
outset of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on 
by itself. It would only have to expand more widely, 
and then dive into its own depth completely, to be one 
with the generative force of life. 

When we see in a living body thousands of cells work- 
ing together to a common end, dividing the task between 
them, living each for itself at the same time as for the others, 
preserving itself, feeding itself, reproducing itself, respond- 
ing to the menace of danger by appropriate defensive 
reactions, how can we help thinking of so many instincts? 
And yet these are the natural functions of the cell, the 
constitutive elements of its vitality. On the other hand, 
when we see the bees of a hive forming a system so strictly 
organized that no individual can live apart from the others 
beyond a certain time, even though furnished with food 
and shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive 
is really, and not metaphorically, a single organism, of 
which each bee is a cell united to the others by invisible 
bonds? The instinct that animates the bee is indistinguish- 
able, then, from the force that animates the cell, or is only 
a prolongation of that force. In extreme cases like this, 
instinct coincides with the work of organization. 

Of course there are degrees of perfection in the same 
instinct. Between the humble-bee, and the honey-bee, 
for instance, the distance is great; and we pass from 
one to the other through a great number of intermediaries, 
which correspond to so many complications of the social 
life. But the same diversity is found in the functioning 



in THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 167 

of histological elements belonging to different tissues more 
or less akin. In both cases there are manifold variations 
on one and the same theme. The constancy of the theme 
is manifest, however, and the variations only fit it to the 
diversity of the circumstances. 

Now, in both cases, in the instinct of the animal and 
in the vital properties of the cell, the same knowledge 
and the same ignorance are shown. All goes on as if 
the cell knew, of the other cells, what concerns itself; 
as if the animal knew, of the other animals, what it can 
utilize — all else remaining in shade. It seems as if life, 
as soon as it has become bound up in a species, is cut off 
from the rest of its own work, save at one or two points 
that are of vital concern to the species just arisen. Is it 
not plain that life goes to work here exactly like conscious- 
ness, exactly like memory? We trail behind us, unawares, 
the whole of our past; but our memory pours into the 
present only the odd recollection or two that in some 
way complete our present situation. Thus the instinctive 
knowledge which one species possesses of another on a 
certain particular point has its root in the very unity of 
life, which is, to use the expression of an ancient philoso- 
pher, a " whole sympathetic to itself ." It is impossible to 
consider some of the special instincts of the animal and of 
the plant, evidently arisen in extraordinary circumstances, 
without relating them to those recollections, seemingly 
forgotten, which spring up suddenly under the pressure 
of an urgent need. 

No doubt many secondary instincts, and also many 
varieties of primary instinct, admit of a scientific ex- 
planation. Yet it is doubtful whether science, with 
its present methods of explanation, will ever succeed in 
analyzing instinct completely. The reason is that in- 
stinct and intelligence are two divergent developments 



168 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

of one and the same principle, which in the one case re- 
mains within itself, in the other steps out of itself and 
becomes absorbed in the utilization of inert matter. This 
gradual divergence testifies to a radical incompatibility, 
and points to the fact that it is impossible for intelligence 
to re-absorb instinct. That which is instinctive in instinct 
cannot be expressed in terms of intelligence, nor, conse- 
quently, can it be analyzed. 

A man born blind, who had lived among others born 
blind, could not be made to believe in the possibility of 
perceiving a distant object without first perceiving all the 
objects in between. Yet vision performs this miracle. 
In a certain sense the blind man is right, since vision, hav- 
ing its origin in the stimulation of the retina, by the vi- 
brations of the light, is nothing else, in fact, but a retinal 
touch. Such is indeed the scientific explanation, for the 
function of science is just to express all perceptions in 
terms of touch. But we have shown elsewhere that the 
philosophical explanation of perception (if it may still be 
called an explanation) must be of another kind. 1 Now 
instinct also is a knowledge at a distance. It has the 
same relation to intelligence that vision has to touch. 
Science cannot do otherwise than express it in terms of 
intelligence; but in so doing it constructs an imitation 
of instinct rather than penetrates within it. 

Any one can convince himself of this by studying the 
ingenious theories of evolutionist biology. They may be 
reduced to two types, which are often intermingled. One 
type, following the principles of neo-Darwinism, regards 
instinct as a sum of accidental differences preserved by 
selection: such and such a useful behavior, naturally 
adopted by the individual in virtue of an accidental pre- 
disposition of the germ, has been transmitted from germ 

1 Matter e et memoir e, chap. i. 



ii.] THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 169 

to germ, waiting for chance to add fresh improvements 
to it by the same method. The other type regards instinct 
as lapsed intelligence: the action, found useful by the 
species or by certain of its representatives, is supposed 
to have engendered a habit, which, by hereditary trans- 
mission, has become an instinct. Of these two types of 
theory, the first has the advantage of being able to bring 
in hereditary transmission without raising grave objection; 
for the accidental modification which it places at the 
origin of the instinct is not supposed to have been acquired 
by the individual, but to have been inherent in the germ. 
But, on the other hand, it is absolutely incapable of ex- 
plaining instincts as sagacious as those of most insects. 
These instincts surely could not have attained, all at once, 
their present degree of complexity; they have probably 
evolved; but, in a hypothesis like that of the neo-Darwin- 
ians, the evolution of instinct could have come to pass only 
by the progressive addition of new pieces which, in some 
way, by happy accidents, came to fit into the old. Now 
it is evident that, in most cases, instinct could not have 
perfected itself by simple accretion: each new piece really 
requires, if all is not to be spoiled, a complete recasting 
of the whole. How could mere chance work a recast- 
ing of the kind? I agree that an accidental modifica- 
tion of the germ may be passed on hereditarily, and may 
somehow wait for fresh accidental modifications to come 
and complicate it. I agree also that natural selection 
may eliminate all those of the more complicated forms 
of instinct that are not fit to survive. Still, in order that 
the life of the instinct may evolve, complications fit to 
survive have to be produced. Now they will be produced 
only if, in certain cases, the addition of a new element 
brings about the correlative change of all the old elements. 
No one will maintain that chance could perform such a 



170 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

miracle: in one form or another we shall appeal to in- 
telligence. We shall suppose that it is by an effort, more 
or less conscious, that the living being develops a higher 
instinct. But then we shall have to admit that an acquired 
habit can become hereditary, and that it does so regularly 
enough to ensure an evolution. The thing is doubtful, 
to put it mildly. Even if we could refer the instincts of 
animals to habits intelligently acquired and hereditarily 
transmitted, it is not clear how this sort of explanation 
could be extended to the vegetable world, where effort 
is never intelligent, even supposing it is sometimes con- 
scious. And yet, when we see with what sureness and 
precision climbing plants use their tendrils, what mar- 
velously combined manoeuvres the orchids perform to 
procure their fertilization by means of insects, 1 how can 
we help thinking that these are so many instincts? 

This is not saying that the theory of the neo-Darwinians 
must be altogether rejected, any more than that of the 
neo-Lamarckians. The first are probably right in holding 
that evolution takes place from germ to germ rather than 
from individual to individual; the second are right in 
saying that at the origin of instinct there is an effort 
(although it is something quite different, we believe, from 
an intelligent effort). But the former are probably wrong 
when they make the evolution of instinct an accidental 
evolution, and the latter when they regard the effort from 
which instinct proceeds as an individual effort. The effort 
by which a species modifies its instinct, and modifies 
itself as well, must be a much deeper thing, dependent 
solely neither on circumstances nor on individuals. It 
is not purely accidental, although accident has a large 
place in it; and it does not depend solely on the initia- 

1 See the two works of Darwin, Climbing Plants and The Fertili- 
zation of Orchids by Insects. 



ii.l THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 171 

tive of individuals, although individuals collaborate in it. 
Compare the different forms of the same instinct in 
different species of hymenoptera. The impression de- 
rived is not always that of an increasing complexity made 
of elements that have been added together one after the 
other. Nor does it suggest the idea of steps up a ladder. 
Rather do we think, in many cases at least, of the circum- 
ference of a circle, from different points of which these 
different varieties have started, all facing the same centre, 
all making an effort in that direction, but each approach- 
ing it only to the extent of its means, and to the extent 
also to which this central point has been illumined for it. 
In other words, instinct is everywhere complete, but it is 
more or less simplified, and, above all, simplified differently. 
On the other hand, in cases where we do get the impression 
of an ascending scale, as if one and the same instinct had 
gone on complicating itself more and more in one direction 
and along a straight line, the species which are thus ar- 
ranged by their instincts into a linear series are by no means 
always akin. Thus, the comparative study, in recent 
years, of the social instinct in the different apidae proves 
that the instinct of the meliponines is intermediary in 
complexity between the still rudimentary tendency of the 
humble bees and the consummate science of the true bees ; 
yet there can be no kinship between the bees and the 
meliponines. 1 Most likely, the degree of complexity of 
these different societies has nothing to do with any greater 
or smaller number of added elements. We seem rather to 
be before a musical theme, which had first been transposed, 
the theme as a whole, into a certain number of tones, 
and on which, still the whole theme, different variations 
had been played, some very simple, others very skilful. 

1 Buttel-Reepen, ' ' Die phylogenetische Entstehung des Bienen- 
staates" {Biol. Centralblatt, xxiii. 1903), p. 108 in particular. 



172 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

As to the original theme, it is everywhere and nowhere. 
It is in vain that we try to express it in terms of any idea: 
it must have been, originally, felt rather than thought. We 
get the same impression before the paralyzing instinct 
of certain wasps. We know that the different species 
of hymenoptera that have this paralyzing instinct lay their 
eggs in spiders, beetles or caterpillars, which, having first 
been subjected by the wasp to a skilful surgical operation, 
will go on living motionless a certain number of days, and 
thus provide the larvae with fresh meat. In the sting 
which they give to the nerve-centres of their victim, in 
order to destroy its power of moving without killing it, 
these different species of hymenoptera take into account, 
so to speak, the different species of prey they respectively 
attack. The Scolia, which attacks a larva of the rose- 
beetle, stings it in one point only, but in this point the 
motor ganglia are concentrated, and those ganglia alone: 
the stinging of other ganglia might cause death and putre- 
faction, which it must avoid. 1 The yellow- winged Sphex, 
which has chosen the cricket for its victim, knows that the 
cricket has three nerve-centres which serve its three pairs 
of legs — or at least it acts as if it knew this. It stings 
the insect first under the neck, then behind the prothorax, 
and then where the thorax joins the abdomen. 2 The 
Ammophila Hirsuta gives nine successive strokes of its 
sting upon nine nerve-centres of its caterpillar, and then 
seizes the head and squeezes it in its mandibles, enough to 
cause paralysis without death. 3 The general theme is 
"the necessity of paralyzing without killing"; the vari- 
ations are subordinated to the structure of the victim on 
which they are played. No doubt the operation is not 

1 Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques , 3 e serie, Paris, 1890, pp. 1-69. 

2 Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques, l re serie, 3 e Edition, Paris, 1894, 
pp. 93 ff. 

3 Fabre, Nouveaux souvenirs entomologiques, Paris, 1882, pp. 14 ff. 



ii.] THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 173 

always perfect. It has recently been shown that the 
Arnmophila sometimes kills the caterpillar instead of 
paralyzing it, that sometimes also it paralyzes it incom- 
pletely. 1 But, because instinct is, like intelligence, fallible, 
because it also shows individual deviations, it does not at 
all follow that the instinct of the Arnmophila has been 
acquired, as has been claimed, by tentative intelligent 
experiments. Even supposing that the Arnmophila has 
come in course of time to recognize, one after another, 
by tentative experiment, the points of its victim which 
must be stung to render it motionless, and also the special 
treatment that must be inflicted on the head to bring about 
paralysis without death, how can we imagine that elements 
so special of a knowledge so precise have been regularly 
transmitted, one by one, by heredity? If, in all our present 
experience, there were a single indisputable example of 
a transmission of this kind, the inheritance of acquired 
characters would be questioned by no one. As a matter 
of fact, the hereditary transmission of a contracted habit 
is effected in an irregular and far from precise manner, 
supposing it is ever really effected at all. 

But the whole difficulty comes from our desire to ex- 
press the knowledge of the hymenoptera in terms of in- 
telligence. It is this that compels us to compare the 
Arnmophila with the entomologist, who knows the cater- 
pillar as he knows everything else — from the outside, and 
without having on his part a special or vital interest. 
The Arnmophila, we imagine, must learn, one by one, 
like the entomologist, the positions of the nerve-centres 
of the caterpillar — must acquire at least the practical 
knowledge of these positions by trying the effects of its 
sting. But there is no need for such a view if we suppose 
a sympathy (in the etymological sense of the word) between 

• Peckham, Wasps, Solitary and Social, Westminster, 1905, pp. 28 ff. 



174 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

the Ammophila and its victim, which teaches it from 
within, so to say, concerning the vulnerability of the 
caterpillar. This feeling of vulnerability might owe noth- 
ing to outward perception, but result from the mere presence 
together of the Ammophila and the caterpillar, considered 
no longer as two organisms, but as two activities. It 
would express, in a concrete form, the relation of the one 
to the other. Certainly, a scientific theory cannot appeal 
to considerations of this kind. It must not put action 
before organization, sympathy before perception and know- 
ledge. But, once more, either philosophy has nothing 
to see here, or its role begins where that of science ends. 

Whether it makes instinct a "compound reflex," or 
a habit formed intelligently that has become automatism, 
or a sum of small accidental advantages accumulated 
and fixed by selection, in every case science claims to 
resolve instinct completely either into intelligent actions, 
or into mechanisms built up piece by piece like those 
combined by our intelligence. I agree indeed that science 
is here within its function. It gives us, in default of a real 
analysis of the object, a translation of this object in terms 
of intelligence. But is it not plain that science itself 
invites philosophy to consider things in another way? 
If our biology was still that of Aristotle, if it regarded the 
series of living beings as unilinear, if it showed us the whole 
of life evolving towards intelligence and passing, to that 
end, through sensibility and instinct, we should be right, 
we, the intelligent beings, in turning back towards the 
earlier and consequently inferior manifestations of life 
and in claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into 
the molds of our understanding. But one of the clearest 
results of biology has been to show that evolution has 
taken place along divergent lines. It is at the extremity 
of two of these lines — the two principal — that we find 



ii.] THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 175 

intelligence and instinct in forms almost pure. Why, 
then, should instinct be resolvable into intelligent elements? 
Why, even, into terms entirely intelligible? Is it not 
obvious that to think here of the intelligent, or of the abso- 
lutely intelligible, is to go back to the Aristotelian theory 
of nature? No doubt it is better to go back to that than 
to stop short before instinct as before an unfathomable 
mystery. But, though instinct is not within the domain 
of intelligence, it is not situated beyond the limits of mind. 
In the phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy 
and antipathy, we experience in ourselves — though under 
a much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with 
intelligence — something of what must happen in the 
consciousness of an insect acting by instinct. Evolu- 
tion does but sunder, in order to develop them to the end, 
elements which, at their origin, interpenetrated each 
other. More precisely, intelligence is, before anything 
else, the faculty of relating one point of space to another, 
one material object to another; it applies to all things, 
but remains outside them; and of a deep cause it perceives 
only the effects spread out side by side. Whatever be 
the force that is at work in the genesis of the nervous 
system of the caterpillar, to our eyes and our intelligence 
it is only a juxtaposition of nerves and nervous centres. 
It is true that we thus get the whole outer effect of it. The 
Ammophila, no doubt, discerns but a very little of that 
force, just what concerns itself; but at least it discerns 
it from within, quite otherwise than by a process of know- 
ledge — by an intuition (lived rather than represented), 
which is probably like what we call divining sympathy. 

A very significant fact is the swing to and fro of scientific 
theories of instinct, from regarding it as intelligent to 
regarding it as simply intelligible, or, shall I say, between 
likening it to an intelligence ''lapsed" and reducing it 



176 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to a pure mechanism. 1 Each of these systems of explana- 
tion triumphs in its criticism of the other, the first when 
it shows us that instinct cannot be a mere reflex, the other 
when it declares that instinct is something different from 
intelligence, even fallen into unconsciousness. What can 
this mean but that they are two symbolisms, equally 
acceptable in certain respects, and, in other respects, 
equally inadequate to their object? The concrete explana- 
tion, no longer scientific, but metaphysical, must be sought 
along quite another path, not in the direction of intelligence, 
but in that of "sympathy." 

Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend 
its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us 
the key to vital operations — just as intelligence, developed 
and disciplined, guides us into matter. For — we cannot 
too often repeat it — intelligence and instinct are turned 
in opposite directions, the former towards inert matter, 
the latter towards life. Intelligence, by means of science, 
which is its work, will deliver up to us more and more 
completely the secret of physical operations; of life it 
brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us, a transla- 
tion in terms of inertia. It goes all round life, taking from 
outside the greatest possible number of views of it, draw- 
ing it into itself instead of entering into it. But it is to 
the very inwardness of life that intuition leads us — by 
intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, 
self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of 
enlarging it indefinitely. 

That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved 

1 See, in particular, among recent works, Be the, "Diirfen wir den 
Ameisen und Bienen psychische Qualitaten zuschreiben?" {Arch. f. d. 
ges. Physiologie, 1898), and Forel, "Un Aper<;u de psycho logie com- 
paree" (Annie psychologique, 1895). 



ii.l LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 177 

by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with 
normal perception. Our eye perceives the features of 
the living being, merely as assembled, not as mutually 
organized. The intention of life, the simple movement 
that runs through the lines, that binds them together and 
gives them significance, escapes it. This intention is 
just what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself 
back within the object by a kind of sympathy, in breaking 
down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space 
puts up between him and his model. It is true that this 
aesthetic intuition, like external perception, only attains 
the individual. But we can conceive an inquiry turned 
in the same direction as art, which would take life in general 
for its object, just as physical science, in following to the 
end the direction pointed out by external perception, pro- 
longs the individual facts into general laws. No doubt 
this philosophy will never obtain a knowledge of its object 
comparable to that which science has of its own. In- 
telligence remains the luminous nucleus around which 
instinct, even enlarged and purified into intuition, forms 
only a vague nebulosity. But, in default of knowledge 
properly so called, reserved to pure intelligence, intuition 
may enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails 
to give us, and indicate the means of supplementing it. 
On the one hand, it will utilize the mechanism of intelli- 
gence itself to show how intellectual molds cease to be 
strictly applicable ; and on the other hand, by its own work, 
it will suggest to us the vague feeling, if nothing more, of 
what must take the place of intellectual molds. Thus, 
intuition may bring the intellect to recognize that life 
does not quite go into the category of the many nor yet 
into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality 
nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital 
process. Then, by the sympathetic communication which 



178 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

it establishes between us and the rest of the living, by the 
expansion of our consciousness which it brings about, 
it introduces us into life's own domain, which is reciprocal 
interpenetration, endlessly continued creation. But, though 
it thereby transcends intelligence, it is from intelligence 
that has come the push that has made it rise to the point 
it has reached. Without intelligence, it would have 
remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special 
object of its practical interest, and turned outward by it 
into movements of locomotion. 

How theory of knowledge must take account of these 
two faculties, intellect and intuition, and how also, for 
want of establishing a sufficiently clear distinction between 
them, it becomes involved in inextricable difficulties, creat- 
ing phantoms of ideas to which there cling phantoms of 
problems, we shall endeavor to show a little further on. 
We shall see that the problem of knowledge, from this point 
of view, is one with the metaphysical problem, and that 
both one and the other depend upon experience. On the 
one hand, indeed, if intelligence is charged with matter and 
instinct with life, we must squeeze them both in order 
to get the double essence from them; metaphysics is 
therefore dependent upon theory of knowledge. But, 
on the other hand, if consciousness has thus split up into 
intuition and intelligence, it is because of the need it had to 
apply itself to matter at the same time as it had to follow 
the stream of life. The double form of consciousness is 
then due to the double form of the real, and theory of 
knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics. In 
fact, each of these two lines of thought leads to the other; 
they form a circle, and there can be no other centre to 
the circle but the empirical study of evolution. It is only 
in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself 
there and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute 



ii] LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 179 

itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition 
of the two terms, as also, perhaps, of their common origin. 
But, on the other hand, by dwelling on this opposition 
of the two elements and on this identity of origin, perhaps 
we shall bring out more clearly the meaning of evolution 
itself. 

Such will be the aim of our next chapter. But the 
facts that we have just noticed must have already sug- 
gested to us the idea that life is connected either with 
consciousness or with something that resembles it. 

Throughout the whole extent of the animal kingdom, 
we have said, consciousness seems proportionate to the 
living being's power of choice. It lights up the zone 
of potentialities that surrounds the act. It fills the interval 
between what is done and what might be done. Looked 
at from without, we may regard it as a simple aid to action, 
a light that action kindles, a momentary spark flying up 
from the friction of real action against possible actions. 
But we must also point out that things would go on in just 
the same way if consciousness, instead of being the effect, 
were the cause. We might suppose that consciousness, 
even in the most rudimentary animal, covers by right an 
enormous field, but is compressed in fact in a kind of vise: 
each advance of the nervous centres, by giving the organism 
a choice between a larger number of actions, calls forth the 
potentialities that are capable of surrounding the real, 
thus opening the vise wider and allowing consciousness 
to pass more freely. In this second hypothesis, as in 
the first, consciousness is still the instrument of action; 
but it is even more true to say that action is the instrument 
of consciousness; for the complicating of action with action, 
and the opposing of action to action, are for the imprisoned 
consciousness the only possible means to set itself free. 
How, then, shall we choose between the two hypotheses? 



180 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

If the first is true, consciousness must express exactly, 
at each instant, the state of the brain; there is strict 
parallelism (so far as intelligible) between the psychical 
and the cerebral state. On the second hypothesis, on 
the contrary, there is indeed solidarity and interdependence 
between the brain and consciousness, but not parallelism: 
the more complicated the brain becomes, thus giving the 
organism greater choice of possible actions, the more 
does consciousness outrun its physical concomitant. Thus, 
the recollection of the same spectacle probably modifies 
in the same way a dog's brain and a man's brain, if the 
perception has been the same; yet the recollection must 
be very different in the man's consciousness from what 
it is in the dog's. In the dog, the recollection remains 
the captive of perception; it is brought back to conscious- 
ness only when an analogous perception recalls it by re- 
producing the same spectacle, and then it is manifested 
by the recognition, acted rather than thought, of the present 
perception much more than by an actual reappearance 
of the recollection itself. Man, on the contrary, is capable 
of calling up the recollection at will, at any moment, in- 
dependently of the present perception. He is not limited 
to 'playing his past life again; he represents and dreams it. 
The local modification of the brain to which the recollection 
is attached being the same in each case, the psychological 
difference between the two recollections cannot have its 
ground in a particular difference of detail between the two 
cerebral mechanisms, but in the difference between the 
two brains taken each as a whole. The more complex 
of the two, in putting a greater number of mechanisms in 
opposition to one another, has enabled consciousness 
to disengage itself from the restraint of one and all and to 
reach independence. That things do happen in this way, 
that the second of the two hypotheses is that which must 



ii.l LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 181 

be chosen, is what we have tried to prove, in a former 
work, by the study of facts that best bring into relief 
the relation of the conscious state to the cerebral state, 
the facts of normal and pathological recognition, in particu- 
lar the forms of aphasia. 1 But it could have been proved 
by pure reasoning, before even it was evidenced by facts. 
We have shown on what self-contradictory postulate, 
on what confusion of two mutually incompatible symbol- 
isms, the hypothesis of equivalence between the cerebral 
state and the psychic state rests. 2 

The evolution of life, looked at from this point, receives 
a clearer meaning, although it cannot be subsumed under 
any actual idea. It is as if a broad current of conscious- 
ness had penetrated matter, loaded, as all consciousness 
is, with an enormous multiplicity of interwoven potential- 
ities. It has carried matter along to organization, but its 
movement has been at once infinitely retarded and in- 
finitely divided. On the one hand, indeed, consciousness 
has had to fall asleep, like the chrysalis in the envelope 
in which it is preparing for itself wings; and, on the other 
hand, the manifold tendencies it contained have been 
distributed among divergent series of organisms which, 
moreover, express these tendencies outwardly in move- 
ments rather than internally in representations. In the 
course of this evolution, while some beings have fallen 
more and more asleep, others have more and more complete- 
ly awakened, and the torpor of some has served the activity 
of others. But the waking could be effected in two different 
ways. Life, that is to say consciousness launched into 
matter, fixed its attention either on its own movement or 
on the matter it was passing through; and it has thus 

1 Matiere et m&moire, chaps, ii. and iii. 

* "Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique" (Revue de mitaphysique, 
Nov. 1904). 



182 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

been turned either in the direction of intuition or in that of 
intellect. Intuition, at first sight, seems far preferable 
to intellect, since in it life and consciousness remain within 
themselves. But a glance at the evolution of living beings 
shows us that intuition could not go very far. On the 
side of intuition, consciousness found itself so restricted 
by its envelope that intuition had to shrink into instinct, 
that is, to embrace only the very small portion of life that 
interested it; and this it embraces only in the dark, touch- 
ing it while hardly seeing it. On this side, the horizon 
was soon shut out. On the contrary, consciousness, in 
shaping itself into intelligence, that is to say in concentrat- 
ing itself at first on matter, seems to externalize itself in 
relation to itself; but, just because it adapts itself thereby 
to objects from without, it succeeds in moving among 
them and in evading the barriers they oppose to it, thus 
opening to itself an unlimited field. Once freed, more- 
over, it can turn inwards on itself, and awaken the po- 
tentialities of intuition which still slumber within it. 

From this point of view, not only does consciousness 
appear as the motive principle of evolution, but also, 
among conscious beings themselves, man comes to occupy 
a privileged place. Between him and the animals the dif- 
ference is no longer one of degree, but of kind. We shall 
show how this conclusion is arrived at in our next chapter. 
Let us now show how the preceding analyses suggest it. 

A noteworthy fact is the extraordinary disproportion 
between the consequences of an invention and the invention 
itself. We have said that intelligence is modeled on matter 
and that it aims in the first place at fabrication. But 
does it fabricate in order to fabricate or does it not pursue 
involuntarily, and even unconsciously, something entirely 
different? Fabricating consists in shaping matter, in 
making it supple and in bending it, in converting it into 



ii.j LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 183 

an instrument in order to become master of it. It is 
this mastery that profits humanity, much more even than 
the material result of the invention itself. Though we 
derive an immediate advantage from the thing made, as 
an intelligent animal might do, and though this advantage 
be all the inventor sought, it is a slight matter compared 
with the new ideas and new feelings that the invention 
may give rise to in every direction, as if the essential part 
of the effect were to raise us above ourselves and enlarge 
our horizon. Between the effect and the cause the dis- 
proportion is so great that it is difficult to regard the cause 
as producer of its effect. It releases it, whilst settling, 
indeed, its direction. Everything happens as though 
the grip of intelligence on matter were, in its main intention, 
to let something pass that matter is holding back. 

The same impression arises when we compare the brain 
of man with that of the animals. The difference at first 
appears to be only a difference of size and complexity. 
But, judging by function, there must be something else 
besides. In the animal, the motor mechanisms that the 
brain succeeds in setting up, or, in other words, the habits 
contracted voluntarily, have no other object nor effect 
than the accomplishment of the movements marked out 
in these habits, stored in these mechanisms. But, in man, 
the motor habit may have a second result, out of proportion 
to the first: it can hold other motor habits in check, and 
thereby, in overcoming automatism, set consciousness 
free. We know what vast regions in the human brain 
language occupies. The cerebral mechanisms that corre- 
spond to the words have this in particular, that they can 
be made to grapple with other mechanisms, those, for 
instance, that correspond to the things themselves, or 
even be made to grapple with one another. Meanwhile 
consciousness, which would have been dragged down and 



184 . CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

drowned in the accomplishment of the act, is restored 
and set free. 1 

The difference must therefore be more radical than a 
superficial examination would lead us to suppose. It is 
the difference between a mechanism which engages the 
attention and a mechanism from which it can be diverted. 
The primitive steam-engine, as Newcomen conceived it, 
required the presence of a person exclusively employed to 
turn on and off the taps, either to let the steam into the 
cylinder or to throw the cold spray into it in order to con- 
dense the steam. It is said that a boy employed on this 
work, and very tired of having to do it, got the idea of 
tying the handles of the taps, with cords, to the beam of 
the engine. Then the machine opened and closed the taps 
itself; it worked all alone. Now, if an observer had com- 
pared the structure of this second machine with that of 
the first without taking into account the two boys left to 
watch over them, he would have found only a slight 
difference of complexity. That is, indeed, all we can per- 
ceive when we look only at the machines. But if we cast a 
glance at the two boys, we shall see that whilst one is 
wholly taken up by the watching, the other is free to 
go and play as he chooses, and that, from this point of 
view, the difference between the two machines is radical, 
the first holding the attention captive, the second setting 
it at liberty. A difference of the same kind, we think, 
would be found between the brain of an animal and the 
human_brain. 

If, now, we should wish to express this in terms of 

1 A geologist whom we have already had occasion to cite, N. S. 
Shaler, well says that "when we come to man, it seems as if we find 
the ancient subjection of mind to body abolished, and the intellectual 
parts develop with an extraordinary rapidity, the structure of the 
body remaining identical in essentials" (Shaler, The Interpretation 
of Nature, Boston, 1899, p. 187). 



ii.] LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 185 

finality, we should have to say that consciousness, after 
having been obliged, in order to set itself free, to divide 
organization into two complementary parts, vegetables 
on one hand and animals on the other, has sought an 
issue in the double direction of instinct and of intelligence. 
It has not found it with instinct, and it has not obtained 
it on the side of intelligence except by a sudden leap 
from the animal to man. So that, in the last analysis, 
man might be considered the reason for the existence of 
the entire organization of life on our planet. But this 
would be only a manner of speaking. There is, in reality, 
only a current of existence and the opposing current; 
thence proceeds the whole evolution of life. We must 
now grasp more closely the opposition of these two currents. 
Perhaps we shall thus discover for them a common source. 
By this we shall also, no doubt, penetrate the most obscure 
regions of metaphysics. However, as the two directions 
we have to follow are clearly marked, in intelligence on the 
one hand, in instinct and intuition on the other, we are not 
afraid of straying. A survey of the evolution of life 
suggests to us a certain conception of knowledge, and also a 
certain metaphysics, which imply each other. Once made 
clear, this metaphysics and this critique may throw some 
light, in their turn, on evolution as a whole. 



CHAPTER III 

ON THE MEANING OF LIFE — THE ORDER OF NATURE 
AND THE FORM OF INTELLIGENCE 

In the course of our first chapter we traced a line of de- 
marcation between the inorganic and the organized, 
but we pointed out that the division of unorganized matter 
into separate bodies is relative to our senses and to our 
intellect, and that matter, looked at as an undivided 
whole, must be a flux rather than a thing. In this we 
were preparing the way for a reconciliation between the 
inert and the living. 

On the other side, we have shown in our second chapter 
that the same opposition is found again between instinct 
and intelligence, the one turned to certain determinations 
of life, the other molded on the configuration of matter. 
But instinct and intelligence, we have also said, stand 
out from the same background, which, for want of a better 
name, we may call consciousness in general, and which 
must be coextensive with universal life. In this way, we 
have disclosed the possibility of showing the genesis of 
intelligence in setting out from general consciousness, 
which embraces it. 

We are now, then, to attempt a genesis of intellect 

at the same time as a genesis of material bodies — two 

enterprises that are evidently correlative, if it be true 

that the main lines of our intellect mark out the general 

form of our action on matter, and that the detail of matter 

is ruled by the requirements of our action. Intellectuality 

186 



ra.i THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 187 

and materiality have been constituted, in detail, by 
reciprocal adaptation. Both are derived from a wider 
and higher form of existence. It is there that we must 
replace them, in order to see them issue forth. 

Such an attempt may appear, at first, more daring 
than the boldest speculations of metaphysicians. It 
claims to go further than psychology, further than cos- 
mology, further than traditional metaphysics; for psy- 
chology, cosmology and metaphysics take intelligence, 
in all that is essential to it, as given, instead of, as we now 
propose, engendering it in its form and in its matter. The 
enterprise is in reality much more modest, as we are going 
to show. But let us first say how it differs from others. 

To begin with psychology, we are not to believe that 
it engenders intelligence when it follows the progressive 
development of it through the animal series. Comparative 
psychology teaches us that the more an animal is intelligent, 
the more it tends to reflect on the actions by which it 
makes use of things, and thus to approximate to man. 
But its actions have already by themselves adopted the 
principal lines of human action; they have made out the 
same general directions in the material world as we have; 
they depend upon the same objects bound together by 
the same relations; so that animal intelligence, although 
it does not form concepts properly so called, already moves 
in a conceptual atmosphere. Absorbed at every instant 
by the actions it performs and the attitudes it must adopt, 
drawn outward by them and so externalized in relation 
to itself, it no doubt plays rather than thinks its ideas; 
this play none the less already corresponds, in the main, 
to the general plan* of human intelligence. 1 To explain 
the intelligence of man by that of the animal consists 

1 We have developed this point in Matiere et mtmoire, chaps, ii. and 
Hi., notably pp. 78-80 and 169-186. 



188 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

then simply in following the development of an embryo 
of humanity into complete humanity. We show how a 
certain direction has been followed further and further 
by beings more and more intelligent. But the moment 
we admit the direction, intelligence is given. 

In a cosmogony like that of Spencer, intelligence is 
taken for granted, as matter also at the same time. We 
are shown matter obeying laws, objects connected with 
objects and facts with facts by constant relations, con- 
sciousness receiving the imprint of these relations and 
laws, and thus adopting the general configuration of 
nature and shaping itself into intellect. But how can 
we fail to see that intelligence is supposed when we admit 
objects and facts? A priori and apart from any hypothesis 
on the nature of the matter, it is evident that the material- 
ity of a body does not stop at the point at which we touch 
it: a body is present wherever its influence is felt; its 
attractive force, to speak only of that, is exerted on the 
sun, on the planets, perhaps on the entire universe. The 
more physics advances, the more it effaces the individuality 
of bodies and even of the particles into which the scientific 
imagination began by decomposing them: bodies and 
corpuscles tend to dissolve into a universal interaction. 
Our perceptions give us the plan of our eventual action 
on things much more than that of things themselves. 
The outlines we find in objects simply mark what we can 
attain and modify in them. The lines we see traced 
through matter are just the paths on which we are called to 
move. Outlines and paths have declared themselves 
in the measure and proportion that consciousness has 
prepared for action on unorganized matter — that is to say, 
in the measure and proportion that intelligence has been 
formed. It is doubtful whether animals built on a different 
plan — a mollusc or an insect, for instance — cut matter up 



in.] THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 189 

along the same articulations. It is not indeed necessary 
that they should separate it into bodies at all. In order to 
follow the indications of instinct, there is no need to per- 
ceive objects, it is enough to distinguish properties. In- 
telligence, on the contrary, even in its humblest form, 
already aims at getting matter to act on matter. If on 
one side matter lends itself to a division into active and 
passive bodies, or more simply into coexistent and distinct 
fragments, it is from this side that intelligence will regard 
it; and the more it busies itself with dividing, the more it 
will spread out in space, in the form of extension adjoining 
extension, a matter that undoubtedly itself has a tendency 
to spatiality, but whose parts are yet in a state of reciprocal 
implication and interpenetration. Thus the same move- 
ment by which the mind is brought to form itself into 
intellect, that is to say, into distinct concepts, brings 
matter to break itself up into objects excluding one another. 
The more consciousness is intellectualized, the more is matter 
spatialized. So that the evolutionist philosophy, when it 
imagines in space a matter cut up on the very lines that 
our action will follow, has given itself in advance, ready 
made, the intelligence of which it claims to show the genesis. 
Metaphysics, applies itself to a work of the same kind, 
though subtler and more self-conscious, when it deduces 
a priori the categories of thought. It compresses intellect, 
reduces it to its quintessence, holds it tight in a principle 
so simple that it can be thought empty : from this principle 
we then draw out what we have virtually put into it. In 
this way we may no doubt show the coherence of intelli- 
gence, define intellect, give its formula, but we do not 
trace its genesis. An enterprise like that of Fichte, al- 
though more philosophical than that of Spencer, in that it 
pays more respect to the true order of things, hardly leads 
us any further. Fichte takes thought in a concentrated 



190 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

state, and expands it into reality; Spencer starts from 
external reality, and condenses it into intellect. But, 
in the one case as in the other, the intellect must be taken 
at the beginning as given — either condensed or expanded, 
grasped in itself by a direct vision or perceived by reflection 
in nature, as in a mirror. 

The agreement of most philosophers on this point 
comes from the fact that they are at one in affirming 
the unity of nature, and in representing this unity under 
an abstract and geometrical form. Between the organized 
and the unorganized they do not see and they will not see 
the cleft. Some start from the inorganic, and, by com- 
pounding it with itself, claim to form the living; others 
place life first, and proceed towards matter by a skilfully 
managed decrescendo; but, for both, there are only dif- 
ferences of degree in nature — degrees of complexity in the 
first hypothesis, of intensity in the second, Once this 
principle is admitted, intelligence becomes as vast as reality; 
for it is unquestionable that whatever is geometrical in 
things is entirely accessible to human intelligence, and 
if the continuity between geometry and the rest is per- 
fect, all the rest must indeed be equally intelligible, 
equally intelligent. Such is the postulate of most systems. 
Any one can easily be convinced of this by comparing 
doctrines that seem to have no common point, no common 
measure, those of Fichte and Spencer for instance, two 
names that we happen to have just brought together. 

At the root of these speculations, then, there are the 
two convictions correlative and complementary, that 
nature is one and that the function of intellect is to embrace 
it in its entirety. The faculty of knowing being supposed 
coextensive with the whole of experience, there can no 
longer be any question of engendering it. It is already 
given, and we merely have to use it, as we use our sight to 



mi THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 191 

take in the horizon. It is true that opinions differ as to 
the value of the result. For some, it is reality itself that 
the intellect embraces; for others, it is only a phantom. 
But, phantom or reality, what intelligence grasps is thought 
to be all that can be attained. 

Hence the exaggerated confidence of philosophy in 
the powers of the individual mind. Whether it is dog- 
matic or critical, whether it admits the relativity of our 
knowledge or claims to be established within the absolute, 
a philosophy is generally the work of a philosopher, a 
single and unitary vision of the whole. It is to be taken 
or left. 

More modest, and also alone capable of being completed 
and perfected, is the philosophy we advocate. Human 
intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all what Plato 
taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to 
look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and 
contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. 
Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the 
play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plow 
and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that 
we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to 
live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the 
work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is 
being plowed, such is the function of human intelligence. 
Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very 
force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which 
we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, 
and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that 
guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local con- 
centration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve 
again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its 
principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But 
the enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is 



192 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

necessarily collective and progressive. It consists in an 
interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding 
to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in 
us and making us even transcend it. 

But this method has against it the most inveterate 
habits of the mind. It at once suggests the idea of a 
vicious circle. In vain, we shall be told, you claim to 
go beyond intelligence: how can you do that except 
// by intelligence? All that is clear in your consciousness 
is intelligence. You are inside your own thought; you 
cannot get out of it. Say, if you like, that the intellect 
is capable of progress, that it will see more and more 
clearly into a greater and greater number of things; but 
do not speak of engendering it, for it is with your intellect 
itself that you would have to do the work. 

The objection presents itself naturally to the mind. 
But the same reasoning would prove also the impossibility 
of acquiring any new habit. It is of the essence of reason- 
ing to shut us up in the circle of the given. But action 
breaks the circle. If we had never seen a man swim, we 
might say that swimming is an impossible thing, inasmuch 
as, to learn to swim, we must begin by holding ourselves 
up in the water and, consequently, already know how to 
swim. Reasoning, in fact, always nails us down to the 
solid ground. But if, quite simply, I throw myself into 
the water without fear, I may keep myself up well enough 
at first by merely struggling, and gradually adapt myself 
to the new environment: I shall thus have learnt to swim. 
So, in theory, there is a kind of absurdity in trying to 
know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the risk be 
frankly accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot that 
reasoning has tied and will not unloose. 

Besides, the risk will appear to grow less, the more 
our point of view is adopted. We have shown that in- 



mi THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY 193 

tellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality, 
but that there has never been a clean cut between the two; 
all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct 
fringe which recalls its origin. And further we compared 
the intellect to a solid nucleus formed by means of con- 
densation. This nucleus does not differ radically from the 
fluid surrounding it. It can only be reabsorbed in it be- 
cause it is made of the same substance. He who throws 
himself into the water, having known only the resistance 
of the solid earth, will immediately be drowned if he does 
not struggle against the fluidity of the new environment: 
he must perforce still cling to that solidity, so to speak, 
which even water presents. Only on this condition can 
he get used to the fluid's fluidity. So of our thought, 
when it has decided to make the leap. 

But leap it must, that is, leave its own environment. 
Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in 
extending them, though the extension would not appear 
at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands 
and thousands of variations on the theme of walking 
will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the 
water, and when you know how to swim, you will under- 
stand how the mechanism of swimming is connected 
with that of walking. Swimming is an extension of walk- 
ing, but walking would never have pushed you on to 
swimming. So you may speculate as intelligently as you 
will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by 
this method, succeed in going beyond it, You may get 
something more complex, but not something higher nor 
even something different. You must take things by storm : 
you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of will. 

So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on the 
contrary, real, we think, in every other method of philoso- 
phy. This we must try to show in a few words, if only 



194 CREATIVE EVOLUTION (chap. 

to prove that philosophy cannot and must not accept 
the relation established by pure intellectualism between 
the theory of knowledge and the theory of the known, 
between metaphysics and science. 

At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the consider- 
ation of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemis- 
try busy themselves with matter, the biological and psy- 
chological sciences with life. The task of the philosopher 
is then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from the 
scientists' hand; and whether he tries to go beyond them 
in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks 
it impossible to go further and even proves it by the analysis 
of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts 
and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect 
that is due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he adds 
a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks 
proper, a metaphysic; but the matter of knowledge he 
regards as the affair of science and not of philosophy. 

But how does he fail to see that the real result of this 
so-called division of labor is to mix up everything and con- 
fuse everything? The metaphysic or the critique that the 
philosopher has reserved for himself he has to receive, 
ready-made, from positive science, it being already con- 
tained in the descriptions and analyses, the whole care 
of which he left to the scientists. For not having wished 
to intervene, at the beginning, in questions of fact, he finds 
himself reduced, in questions of principle, to formulating 
purely and simply in more precise terms the unconscious 
and consequently inconsistent metaphysic and critique 
which the very attitude of science to reality marks out. 
Let us not be deceived by an apparent analogy between 
natural things and human things. Here we are not in 
the judiciary domain, where the description of fact and the 



nil SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 195 

judgment on the fact are two distinct things, distinct 
for the very simple reason that above the fact, and in- 
dependent of it, there is a law promulgated by a legislator. 
Here the laws are internal to the facts and relative to the 
lines that have been followed in cutting the real intc 
distinct facts. We cannot describe the outward appearance 
of the object without prejudging its inner nature and its 
organization. Form is no longer entirely isolable from 
matter, and he who has begun by reserving to philos- 
ophy questions of principle, and who has thereby tried 
to put philosophy above the sciences, as a "court of cassa- 
tion" is above the courts of assizes and of appeal, will 
gradually come to make no more of philosophy than a 
registration court, charged at most with wording more 
precisely the sentences that are brought to it, pronounced 
and irrevocable. 

Positive science is, in fact, a work of pure intellect. 
Now, whether our conception of the intellect be accepted 
or rejected, there is one point on which everybody will 
agree with us, and that is that the intellect is at home in 
the presence of unorganized matter. This matter it makes 
use of more and more by mechanical inventions, and 
mechanical inventions become the easier to it the more it 
thinks matter as mechanism. The intellect bears within 
itself, in the form of natural logic, a latent geometrism 
that is set free in the measure and proportion that the 
intellect penetrates into the inner nature of inert matter. 
Intelligence is in tune with this matter, and that is why 
the physics and metaphysics of inert matter are so near 
each other. Now, when the intellect undertakes the 
study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the inert, 
applying the same forms to this new object, carrying 
over into this new field the same habits that have succeeded 
so well in the old ; and it is right to do so, for only on such 



196 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

terms does the living offer to our action the same hold as 
inert matter. But the truth we thus arrive at becomes 
altogether relative to our faculty of action. It is no more 
than a symbolic verity. It cannot have the same value 
as the physical verity, being only an extension of physics 
to an object which we are a priori agreed to look at only 
in its external aspect. The duty of philosophy should be 
to intervene here actively, to examine the living without 
any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing itself 
from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual. 
Its own special object is to speculate, that is to say, to 
see; its attitude toward the living should not be that of 
science, which aims only at action, and which, being able 
to act only by means of inert matter, presents to itself 
the rest of reality in this single respect. What must the 
result be, if it leave biological and psychological facts 
to positive science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, 
physical facts? It will accept a priori a mechanistic 
conception of all nature, a conception unreflected and even 
unconscious, the outcome of the material need. It will 
a priori accept the doctrine of the simple unity of know- 
ledge and of the abstract unity of nature. 

The moment it does so, its fate is sealed. The philoso- 
pher has no longer any choice save between a metaphysical 
dogmatism and a metaphysical skepticism, both of which 
rest, at bottom, on the same postulate, and neither of which 
adds anything to positive science. He may hypostasize 
the unity of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, 
the unity of science, in a being who is nothing since he 
does nothing, an ineffectual God who simply sums up in 
himself all the given; or in an eternal Matter from whose 
womb have been poured out the properties of things and 
the laws of nature; or, again, in a pure Form which en- 
deavors to seize an unseizable multiplicity, and which is, 



in.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 197 

as we will, the form of nature or the form of thought. 
All these philosophies tell us, in their different languages, 
that science is right to treat the living as the inert, and that 
there is no difference of value, no distinction to be made 
between the results which intellect arrives at in applying 
its categories, whether it rests on inert matter or attacks 
life. 

In many cases, however, we feel the frame cracking. 
But as we did not begin by distinguishing between the 
inert and the living, the one adapted in advance to the 
frame in which we insert it, the other incapable of be- 
ing held in the frame otherwise than by a convention 
which eliminates from it all that is essential, we find our- 
selves, in the end, reduced to regarding everything the 
frame contains with equal suspicion. To a metaphysical 
dogmatism, which has erected into an absolute the factitious 
unity of science, there succeeds a skepticism or a relativism 
that universalizes and extends to all the results of science 
the artificial character of some among them. So philosophy 
swings to and fro between the doctrine that regards ab- 
solute reality as unknowable and that which, in the idea 
it gives us of this reality, says nothing more than science 
has said. For having wished to prevent all conflict be- 
tween science and philosophy, we have sacrificed philosophy 
without any appreciable gain to science. And for having 
tried to avoid the seeming vicious circle which consists 
in using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find 
ourselves turning in a real circle, that which consists in 
laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity that we 
began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly 
and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole 
of experience to science and the whole of reality to the 
pure understanding. 

Let us begin, on the contrary, by tracing a line of de- 



198 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

marcation between the inert and the living. We shall 
find that the inert enters naturally into the frames of the 
intellect, but that the living is adapted to these frames 
only artificially, so that we must adopt a special attitude 
towards it and examine it with other eyes than those of 
positive science. Philosophy, then, invades the domain 
of experience. She busies herself with many things which 
hitherto have not concerned her. Science, theory of know- 
ledge, and metaphysics find themselves on the same ground. 
At first there may be a certain confusion. All three may 
think they have lost something. But all three will profit 
from the meeting. 

Positive science, indeed, may pride itself on the uniform 
value attributed to its affirmations in the whole field of 
experience. But, if they are all placed on the same foot- 
ing, they are all tainted with the same relativity. It 
is not so, if we begin by making the distinction which, 
in our view, is forced upon us. The understanding is 
at home in the domain of unorganized matter. On this 
matter human action is naturally exercised; and action, 
as we said above, cannot be set in motion in the unreal. 
Thus, of physics — so long as we are considering only its 
general form and not the particular cutting out of matter 
in which it is manifested — we may say that it touches 
the absolute. On the contrary, it is by accident — chance 
or convention, as you please — that science obtains a hold 
on the living analogous to the hold it has on matter. Here 
the use of conceptual frames is no longer natural. I do not 
wish to say that it is not legitimate, in the scientific mean- 
ing of the term. If science is to extend our action on 
things, and if we can act only with inert matter for in- 
strument, science can and must continue to treat the 
living as it has treated the inert. But, in doing so, it 
must be understood that the further it penetrates the 



in.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 199 

depths of life, the more symbolic, the more relative to 
the contingencies of action, the knowledge it supplies 
to us becomes. On this new ground philosophy ought 
then to follow science, in order to superpose on scientific 
truth a knowledge of another kind, which may be called 
metaphysical. Thus combined, all our knowledge, both 
scientific and metaphysical, is heightened. In the absolute 
we live and move and have our being. The knowledge 
we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external 
or relative. It is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning 
of the word, that we reach by the combined and pro- 
gressive development of science and of philosophy. 

Thus, in renouncing the factitious unity which the 
understanding imposes on nature from outside, we shall 
perhaps find its true, inward and living unity. For the 
effort we make to transcend the pure understanding in- 
troduces us into that more vast something out of which 
our understanding is cut, and from which it has detached 
itself. And, as matter is determined by intelligence, as 
there is between them an evident agreement, we cannot 
make the genesis of the one without making the genesis 
of the other. An identical process must have cut out 
matter and the intellect, at the same time, from a stuff 
that contained both. Into this reality we shall get back 
more and more completely, in proportion as we compel 
ourselves to transcend pure intelligence. 

Let us then concentrate attention on that which we 
have that is at the same time the most removed from 
externality and the least penetrated with intellectuality. 
Let us seek, in the depths of our experience, the point 
where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own 
life. It is into pure duration that we then plunge back, 
a duration in which the past, always moving on, is swelling 



200 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new. But? 
at the same time, we feel the spring of our will strained 
to its utmost limit. We must, by a strong recoil of our 
personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping 
away, in order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a 
present which it will create by entering. Rare indeed are 
the moments when we are self-possessed to this extent: 
it is then that our actions are truly free. And even at 
these moments we do not completely possess ourselves. 
Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding 
of ourself with itself, admits of degrees. But the more 
the feeling is deep and the coincidence complete, the 
more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intellectuality 
by transcending it. For the natural function of the in- 
tellect is to bind like to like, and it is only facts that can 
be repeated that are entirely adaptable to intellectual 
conceptions. Now, our intellect does undoubtedly grasp 
the real moments of real duration after they are past; 
we do so by reconstituting the new state of consciousness 
out of a series of views taken of it from the outside, each 
of which resembles as much as possible something already 
known; in this sense we may say that the state of con- 
sciousness contains intellectuality implicitly. Yet the 
state of consciousness overflows the intellect; it is indeed 
incommensurable with the intellect, being itself indivisible 
and new. 

Now let us relax the strain, let us interrupt the effort 
to crowd as much as possible of the past into the present. 
If the relaxation were complete, there would no longer 
be either memory or will — which amounts to saying that, 
in fact, we never do fall into this absolute passivity, any 
more than we can make ourselves absolutely free. But, 
in the limit, we get a glimpse of an existence made of a 
present which recommences unceasingly — devoid of real 



in.] INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 201 

duration, nothing but the instantaneous which dies and 
is born again endlessly. Is the existence of matter of 
this nature? Not altogether, for analysis resolves it into 
elementary vibrations, the shortest of which are of very 
slight duration, almost vanishing, but not nothing. It 
may be presumed, nevertheless, that physical existence 
inclines in this second direction, as psychical existence 
in the first. 

Behind " spirituality" on theone hand, and "materiality" 
with intellectuality on the other, there are then two pro- 
cesses opposite in their direction, and we pass from the 
first to the second by way of inversion, or perhaps even by 
simple interruption, if it is true that inversion and in- 
terruption are two terms which in this case must be held 
to be synonymous, as we shall show at more length later 
on. This presumption is confirmed when we consider 
things from the point of view of extension, and no longer 
from that of duration, alone. 

The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious 
of our progress in pure duration, the more we feel the 
different parts of our being enter into each other, and 
our whole personality concentrate itself in a point, or 
rather a sharp edge, pressed against the future and cutting 
into it unceasingly. It is in this that life and action are 
free. But suppose we let ourselves go and, instead of 
acting, dream. At once the self is scattered; our past, 
which till then was gathered together into the indivisible 
impulsion it communicated to us, is broken up into a 
thousand recollections made external to one another. 
They give up interpenetrating in the degree that they 
become fixed. Our personality thus descends in the 
direction of space. It coasts around it continually in 
sensation. We will not dwell here on a point we have 
studied elsewhere. Let us merely recall that extension 



202 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

admits of degrees, that all sensation is extensive in a certain 
measure, and that the idea of unextended sensations, 
artificially localized in space, is a mere view of the mind, 
suggested by an unconscious metaphysic much more 
than by psychological observation. 

No doubt we make only the first steps in the direction 
of the extended, even when we let ourselves go as much 
as we can. But suppose for a moment that matter con- 
sists in this very movement pushed further, and that 
physics is simply psychics inverted. We shall now under- 
stand why the mind feels at its ease, moves about naturally 
in space, when matter suggests the more distinct idea of it. 
This space it already possessed as an implicit idea in its 
own eventual detension, that is to say, of its own possible 
extension. The mind finds space in things, but could have 
got it without them if it had had imagination strong enough 
to push the inversion of its own natural movement to 
the end. On the other hand, we are able to explain how 
matter accentuates still more its materiality, when viewed 
by the mind. Matter, at first, aided mind to run down its 
own incline; it gave the impulsion. But, the impulsion 
once received, mind continues its course. The idea that 
it forms of pure space is only the schema of the limit at 
which this movement would end. Once in possession of 
the form of space, mind uses it like a net with meshes 
that can be made and unmade at will, which, thrown 
over matter, divides it as the needs of our action demand. 
Thus, the space of our geometry and the spatiality of things 
are mutually engendered by the reciprocal action and 
reaction of two terms which are essentially the same, but 
which move each in the direction inverse of the other. 
Neither is space so foreign to our nature as we imagine, 
nor is matter as completely extended in space as our 
senses and intellect represent it. 



ni.i INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 203 

We have treated of the first point elsewhere. As to 
the second, we will limit ourselves to pointing out that 
perfect spatiality would consist in a perfect externality 
of parts in their relation to one another, that is to say, 
in a complete reciprocal independence. Now, there is no 
material point that does not act on every other material 
point. When we observe that a thing really is there where 
it acts, we shall be led to say (as Faraday 1 was) that all 
the atoms interpenetrate and that each of them fills the 
world. On such a hypothesis, the atom or, more generally, 
the material point, becomes simply a view of the mind, 
a view which we come to take when we continue far enough 
the work (wholly relative to our faculty of acting) by 
which we subdivide matter into bodies. Yet it is undeniable 
that matter lends itself to this subdivision, and that, in 
supposing it breakable into parts external to one another, 
we are constructing a science sufficiently representative 
of the real. It is undeniable that if there be no entirely 
isolated system, yet science finds means of cutting up the 
universe into systems relatively independent of each other, 
and commits no appreciable error in doing so. What else 
can this mean but that matter extends itself in space with- 
out being absolutely extended therein, and that in regarding 
matter as decomposable into isolated systems, in attribut- 
ing to it quite distinct elements which change in relation to 
each other without changing in themselves (which are 
"displaced," shall we say, without being "altered"), in 
short, in conferring on matter the properties of pure 
space, we are transporting ourselves to the terminal point 
of the movement of which matter simply indicates the 
direction? 

What the Transcendental Aesthetic of Kant appears 

1 Faraday, A Speculation concerning Electric Conduction (Philosophi- 
cal Magazine, 3d. series, vol. xxiv.). 



204 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to have established once for all is that extension is not 
a material attribute of the same kind as others. We 
cannot reason indefinitely on the notions of heat, color, 
or weight: in order to know the modalities of weight or 
of heat, we must have recourse to experience. Not so 
of the notion of space. Supposing even that it is given 
empiricalfy by sight and touch (and Kant has not questioned 
the fact) there is this about it that is remarkable that our 
mind, speculating on it with its own powers alone, cuts 
out in it, a priori, figures whose properties we determine 
a priori: experience, with which we have not kept in touch, 
yet follows us through the infinite complications of our 
reasonings and invariably justifies them. That is the fact. 
Kant has set it in clear light. But the explanation of the 
fact, we believe, must be sought in a different direction 
to that which Kant followed. 

Intelligence, as Kant represents it to us, is bathed 
in an atmosphere of spatiality to which it is as inseparably 
united as the living body to the air it breathes. Our 
perceptions reach us only after having passed through 
this atmosphere. They have been impregnated in ad- 
vance by our geometry, so that our faculty of thinking only 
finds again in matter the mathematical properties which 
our faculty of perceiving has already deposed there. We 
are assured, therefore, of seeing matter yield itself with 
docility to our reasonings ; but this matter, in all that it has 
that is intelligible, is our own work; of the reality "in 
itself" we know nothing and never shall know anything, 
since we only get its refraction through the forms of our 
faculty of perceiving. So that if we claim to affirm some- 
thing of it, at once there rises the contrary affirmation, 
equally demonstrable, equally plausible. The ideality 
of space is proved directly by the analysis of knowledge 
indirectly by the antinomies to which the opposite theory 



mi INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 205 

leads. Such is the governing idea of the Kantian criticism. 
It has inspired Kant with a peremptory refutation of 
"empiricist" theories of knowledge. It is, in our opinion, 
definitive in what it denies. But, in what it affirms, does 
it give us the solution of the problem? 

With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of 
our perceptive faculty — a veritable deus ex machina, of 
which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is what 
it is rather than anything else. " Things-in-themselves" 
are also given, of which he claims that we can know noth- 
ing: by what right, then, can he affirm their existence, 
even as "problematic"? If the unknowable reality pro- 
jects into our perceptive faculty a "sensuous manifold" 
capable of fitting into it exactly, is it not, by that very 
fact, in part known? And when we examine this exact 
fitting, shall we not be led, in one point at least, to suppose 
a pre-established harmony between things and our mind — 
an idle hypothesis, which Kant was right in wishing to 
avoid? At bottom, it is for not having distinguished 
degrees in spatiality that he has had to take space ready- 
made as given — whence the question how the "sensuous 
manifold" is adapted to it. It is for the same reason 
that he has supposed matter wholly developed into parts 
absolutely external to one another; — whence antinomies, 
of which we may plainly see that the thesis and antithesis 
suppose the perfect coincidence of matter with geometrical 
space, but which vanish the moment we cease to extend 
to matter what is true only of pure space. Whence, 
finally, the conclusion that there are three alternatives, 
and three only, among which to choose a theory of know- 
ledge: either the mind is determined by things, or things 
are determined by the mind, or between mind and things 
we must suppose a mysterious agreement. 

But the truth is that there is a fourth, which does not 



206 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

seem to have occurred to Kant — in the first place because 
he did not think that the mind overflowed the intellect, 
and in the second place (and this is at bottom the same thing) 
because he did not attribute to duration an absolute exist- 
ence, having put time, a priori, on the same plane as space. 
This alternative consists, first of all, in regarding the intel- 
lect as a special function of the mind, essentially turned 
toward inert matter; then in saying that neither does mat- 
ter determine the form of the intellect, nor does the in- 
tellect impose its form on matter, nor have matter and 
intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we 
know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect 
and matter have progressively adapted themselves one to 
the other in order to attain at last a common form. This 
adaptation has, moreover, been brought about quite naturally, 
because it is the same inversion of the same movement which 
creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality 
of things. 

From this point of view the knowledge of matter that 
our perception on one hand and science on the other 
give to us appears, no doubt, as approximative, but not as 
relative. Our perception, whose role it is to hold up a 
light to our actions, works a dividing up of matter that is 
always too sharply defined, always subordinated to practi- 
cal needs, consequently always requiring revision. Our 
science, which aspires to the mathematical form, over- 
accentuates the spatiality of matter; its formulae are, 
in general, too precise, and ever need remaking. For a 
scientific theory to be final, the mind would have to em- 
brace the totality of things in block and place each thing 
in its exact relation to every other thing; but in reality 
we are obliged to consider problems one by one, in terms 
which are, for that very reason, provisional, so that the 
solution of each problem will have to be corrected indefi- 



in.] INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 207 

nitely by the solution that will be given to the problems 
that will follow: thus, science as a whole is relative to 
the particular order in which the problems happen to have 
been put. It is in this meaning, and to this degree, that 
science must be regarded as conventional. But it is a 
conventionality of fact so to speak, and not of right. 
In principle, positive science bears on reality itself, pro- 
vided it does not overstep the limits of its own domain, 
which is inert matter. 

Scientific knowledge, thus regarded, rises to a higher 
plane. In return, the theory of knowledge becomes 
an infinitely difficult enterprise, and which passes the 
powers of the intellect alone. It is not enough to deter- 
mine, by careful analysis, the categories of thought; 
we must engender them. As regards space, we must, 
by an effort of mind sui generis, follow the progression 
or rather the regression of the extra-spatial degrading 
itself into spatiality. When we make ourselves self- 
conscious in the highest possible degree and then let our- 
selves fall back little by little, we get the feeling of ex- 
tension : we have an extension of the self into recollections 
that are fixed and external to one another, in place of the 
tension it possessed as an indivisible active will. But 
this is only a beginning. Our consciousness, sketching 
the movement, shows us its direction and reveals to us 
the possibility of continuing it to the end; but conscious- 
ness itself does not go so far. Now, on the other hand, 
if we consider matter, which seems to us at first coincident 
with space, we find that the more our attention is fixed 
on it, the more the parts which we said were laid side by 
side enter into each other, each of them undergoing the 
action of the whole, which is consequently somehow present 
in it. Thus, although matter stretches itself out in the 
direction of space, it does not completely attain it ; whence 



208 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

we may conclude that it only carries very much further 
the movement that consciousness is able to sketch within 
us in its nascent state. We hold, therefore, the two ends 
of the chain, though we do not succeed in seizing the inter- 
mediate links. Will they always escape us? We must 
remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not yet be- 
come completely conscious of itself. Physics understands 
its role when it pushes matter in the direction of spatiality; 
but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply 
trodden in the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of 
going further in the same direction? Should not its own 
task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that 
physics descends, to bring back matter to its origins, and 
to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, 
so to speak, a reversed psychology? All that which seems 
positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would 
become, from this new point of view, an interruption or 
inversion of the true positivity, which would have to be 
defined in psychological terms. 

When we consider the admirable order of mathematics, 
the perfect agreement of the objects it deals with, the 
immanent logic in numbers and figures, our certainty 
of always getting the same conclusion, however diverse 
and complex our reasonings on the same subject^ we 
hesitate to see in properties apparently so positive a system 
of negations, the absence -rather than the presence of a true 
reality. But we must not forget that our intellect, which 
finds this order and wonders at it, is directed in the same 
line of movement that leads to the materiality and spatial- 
ity of its object. The more complexity the intellect puts 
into its object by analyzing it, the more complex is the order 
it finds there. And this order and this complexity neces- 
sarily appear to the intellect as a positive reality, since 



iii.j THE GEOMETRICAL ORDER 209 

reality and intellectuality are turned in the same direction. 
When a poet reads me his verses, I can interest myself 
enough in him to enter into his thought, put myself into 
his feelings, live over again the simple state he has broken 
into phrases and words. I sympathize then with his 
inspiration, I follow it with a continuous movement which 
is, like the inspiration itself, an undivided act. Now, I 
need only relax my attention, let go the tension that there 
is in me, for the sounds, hitherto swallowed up in the sense, 
to appear to me distinctly, one by one, in their materiality. 
For this I have not to do anything; it is enough to withdraw 
something. In proportion as I let myself go, the successive 
sounds will become the more individualized; as the phrases 
were broken into words, so the words will scan in syllables 
which I shall perceive one after another. Let me go 
farther still in the direction of dream: the letters them- 
selves will become loose and will be seen to dance along, 
hand in hand, on some fantastic sheet of paper. I shall 
then admire the precision of the interweavings, the mar- 
velous order of the procession, the exact insertion of the 
letters into the syllables, of the syllables into the words and 
of the words into the sentences. The farther I pursue 
this quite negative direction of relaxation, the more ex- 
tension and complexity I shall create; and the more the 
complexity in its turn increases, the more admirable will 
seem to be the order which continues to reign, undisturbed, 
among the elements. Yet this complexity and extension 
represent nothing positive; they express a deficiency of 
will. And, on the other hand, the order must grow with 
the complexity, since it is only an aspect of it. The more 
we perceive, symbolically, parts in an indivisible whole, 
the more the number of the relations that the parts have 
between themselves necessarily increases, since the same 
undividedness of the real whole continues to hover over 



210 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

the growing multiplicity of the symbolic elements into 
which the scattering of the attention has decomposed 
it. A comparison of this kind will enable us to understand, 
in some measure, how the same suppression of positive 
reality, the same inversion of a certain original movement, 
can create at once extension in space and the admirable 
order which mathematics finds there. There is, of course, 
this difference between the two cases, that words and letters 
have been invented by a positive effort of humanity, while 
space arises automatically, as the remainder of a sub- 
traction arises once the two numbers are posited. 1 But, 
in the one case as in the other, the infinite complexity 
of the parts and their perfect coordination among them- 
selves are created at one and the same time by an inversion 
which is, at bottom, an interruption, that is to say, a 
diminution of positive reality. 

All the operations of our intellect tend to geometry, 
as to the goal where they find their perfect fulfilment. 

1 Our comparison does no more than develop the content of the term 
Xoyos, as Plotinus understands it. For while the Xoyos of this phi- 
losopher is a generating and informing power, an aspect or a fragment 
of the (pu%ij, on the other hand Plotinus sometimes speaks of it as of a 
discourse. More generally, the relation that we establish in the present 
chapter between "extension" and "detension" resembles in some 
aspects that which Plotinus supposes (some developments of which 
must have inspired M. Ravaisson) when he makes extension not indeed 
an inversion of original Being, but an enfeeblement of its essence, one 
of the last stages of the procession, (see in particular, Enn. IV. iii. 9-11, 
and III. vi. 17-18). Yet ancient philosophy did not see what con- 
sequences would result from this for mathematics, for Plotinus, like 
Plato, erected mathematical essences into absolute realities. Above 
all, it suffered itself to be deceived by the purely superficial analogy 
of duration with extension. It treated the one as it treated the other, 
regarding change as a degradation of immutability, the sensible as a 
fall from the intelligible. Whence, as we shall show in the next chapter, 
a philosophy which fails to recognize the real function and scope of the 
intellect. 



in.] THE GEOMETRICAL ORDER 211 

But, as geometry is necessarily prior to them (since these 
operations have not as their end to construct space and 
cannot do otherwise than take it as given) it is evident 
that it is a latent geometry, immanent in our idea of space, 
which is the main spring of our intellect and the cause of its 
working. We shall be convinced of this if we consider 
the two essential functions of intellect, the faculty of de- 
duction and that of induction. 

Let us begin with deduction. The same movement 
by which I trace a figure in space engenders its properties : 
they are visible and tangible in the movement itself; I 
feel, I see in space the relation of the definition to its 
consequences, of the premisses to the conclusion. All 
the other concepts of which experience suggests the idea 
to me are only in part constructible a 'priori; the definition 
of them is therefore imperfect, and the deductions into 
which these concepts enter, however closely the conclusion 
is linked to the premisses, participate in this imperfection. 
But when I trace roughly in the sand the base of a tri- 
angle, as I begin to form the two angles at the base, I 
know positively, and understand absolutely, that if these 
two angles are equal the sides will be equal also, the figure 
being then able to be turned over on itself without there 
being any change whatever. I know it before I have 
learnt geometry. Thus, prior to the science of geometry, 
there is a natural geometry whose clearness and evidence 
surpass the clearness and evidence of other deductions. 
Now, these other deductions bear on qualities, and not on 
magnitudes purely. They are, then, likely to have been 
formed on the model of the first, and to borrow their force 
from the fact that, behind quality, we see magnitude 
vaguely showing through. We may notice, as a fact, 
that questions of situation and of magnitude are the first 
that present themselves to our activity, those which in- 



212 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

telligence externalized in action resolves even before 
reflective intelligence has appeared. The savage under- 
stands better than the civilized man how to judge distances, 
to determine a direction, to retrace by memory the often 
complicated plan of the road he has traveled, and so to 
return in a straight line to his starting-point. 1 If the 
animal does not deduce explicitly, if he does not form 
explicit concepts, neither does he form the idea of a homo- 
geneous space. You cannot present this space to your- 
self without introducing, in the same act, a virtual geometry 
which will, of itself, degrade itself into logic. All the re- 
pugnance that philosophers manifest towards this manner 
of regarding things comes from this, that the logical work 
of the intellect represents to their eyes a positive spiritual 
effort. But, if we understand by spirituality a progress 
to ever new creations, to conclusions incommensurable 
with the premisses and indeterminable by relation to them, 
we must say of an idea that moves among relations of 
necessary determination, through premisses which contain 
their conclusion in advance, that it follows the inverse 
direction, that of materiality. What appears, from the 
point of view of the intellect, as an effort, is in itself a 
letting go. And while, from the point of view of the 
intellect, there is a petitio principii in making geometry 
arise automatically from space, and logic from geometry — 
on the contrary, if space is the ultimate goal of the mind's 
movement of detention, space cannot be given without 
positing also logic and geometry, which are along the course 
of the movement of which pure spatial intuition is the goal. 
It has not been enough noticed how feeble is the reach 
of deduction in the psychological and moral sciences. 
From a proposition verified by facts, verifiable consequences 
can here be drawn only up to a certain point, only in a 

l Bastian, The Brain as an Organ of the Mind, pp. 214-16. 



in.] GEOMETRY AND DEDUCTION 213 

certain measure. Very soon appeal has to be made to 
common sense, that is to say, to the continuous experience 
of the real, in order to inflect the consequences deduced 
and bend them along the sinuosities of life. Deduction 
succeeds in things moral only metaphorically, so to speak, 
and just in the measure in which the moral is transposable 
into the physical, I should say translatable into spatial 
symbols. The metaphor never goes very far, any more 
than a curve can long be confused with its tangent. Must 
we not be struck by this feebleness of deduction as some- 
thing very strange and even paradoxical? Here is a pure 
operation of the mind, accomplished solely by the power 
of the mind. It seems that, if anywhere it should feel 
at home and evolve at ease, it would be among the things 
of the mind, in the domain of the mind. Not at all; 
it is there that it is immediately at the end of its tether. 
On the contrary, in geometry, in astronomy, in physics, 
where we have to do with things external to us, deduction 
is all-powerful! Observation and experience are un- 
doubtedly necessary in these sciences to arrive at the 
principle, that is, to discover the aspect under which 
things must be regarded; but, strictly speaking, we might, 
by good luck, have hit upon it at once; and, as soon as we 
possess this principle, we may draw from it, at any length, 
consequences which experience will always verify. Must 
we not conclude, therefore, that deduction is an operation 
governed by the properties of matter, molded on the 
mobile articulations of matter, implicitly given, in fact, 
with the space that underlies matter? As long as it turns 
upon space or spatialized time, it has only to let itself 
go. It is duration that puts spokes in its wheels. 

Deduction, then, does not work unless there be spatial 
intuition behind it. But we may say the same of induction. 



214 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

It is not necessary indeed to think geometrically, nor even 
to think at all, in order to expect from the same conditions 
a repetition of the same fact. The consciousness of the 
animal already does this work, and indeed, independently 
of all consciousness, the living body itself is so constructed 
that it can extract from the successive situations in which 
it finds itself the similarities which interest it, and so 
respond to the stimuli by appropriate reactions. But 
it is a far cry from a mechanical expectation and reaction 
of the body, to induction properly so called, which is 
an intellectual operation. Induction rests on the belief 
that there are causes and effects, and that the same effects 
follow the same causes. Now, if we examine this double 
belief, this is what we find. It implies, in the first place, 
that reality is decomposable into groups, which can be 
practically regarded as isolated and independent. If I 
boil water in a kettle on a stove, the operation and the 
objects that support it are, in reality, bound up with a 
multitude of other objects and a multitude of other oper- 
ations; in the end, I should find that our entire solar 
system is concerned in what is being done at this particular 
point of space. But, in a certain measure, and for the 
special end I am pursuing, I may admit that things happen 
as if the group water-kettle-stove were an independent 
microcosm. That is my first affirmation. Now, when I 
say that this microcosm will always behave in the same 
way, that the heat will necessarily, at the end of a certain 
time, cause the boiling of the water, I admit that it is 
sufficient that a certain number of elements of the system 
be given in order that the system should be complete; 
it completes itself automatically, I am not free to complete 
it in thought as I please. The stove, the kettle and the 
water being given, with a certain interval of duration, 
it seems to me that the boiling, which experience showed 



hi.] GEOMETRY AND INDUCTION 215 

me yesterday to be the only thing wanting to complete 
the system, will complete it to-morrow, no matter when 
to-morrow may be. What is there at the base of this 
belief? Notice that the belief is more or less assured, 
according as the case may be, but that it is forced upon the 
mind as an absolute necessity when the microcosm con- 
sidered contains only magnitudes. If two numbers be 
given, I am not free to choose their difference. If two 
sides of a triangle and the contained angle are given, the 
third side arises of itself and the triangle completes itself 
automatically. I can, it matters not where and it matters 
not when, trace the same two sides containing the same 
angle: it is evident that the new triangles so formed can be 
superposed on the first, and that consequently the same 
third side will come to complete the system. Now, if 
my certitude is perfect in the case in which I reason on 
pure space determinations, must I not suppose that, in 
the other cases, the certitude is greater the nearer it ap- 
proaches this extreme case? Indeed, may it not be 
the limiting case which is seen through all the others 
and which colors them, accordingly as they are more or 
less transparent, with a more or less pronounced tinge 
of geometrical necessity? 1 In fact, when I say that 
the water on the fire will boil to-day as it did yesterday, 
and that this is an absolute necessity, I feel vaguely that 
my imagination is placing the stove of yesterday on that 
of to-day, kettle on kettle, water on water, duration on 
duration, and it seems then that the rest must coincide 
also, for the same reason that, when two triangles are 
superposed and two of their sides coincide, their third 
sides coincide also. But my imagination acts thus only 
because it shuts its eyes to two essential points. For the 

1 We have dwelt on this point in a former work. See the Essai sur les 
donnies immediates de la conscience, Paris, 1889, pp. 155-160. 



216 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

system of to-day actually to be superimposed on that of 
yesterday, the latter must have waited for the former, 
time must have halted, and everything become simultane- 
ous: that happens in geometry, but in geometry alone. 
Induction therefore implies first that, in the world of the 
physicist as in that of the geometrician, time does not 
count. But it implies also that qualities can be superposed 
on each other like magnitudes. If, in imagination, I 
place the stove and fire of to-day on that of yesterday, I 
find indeed that the form has remained the same; it suffices, 
for that, that the surfaces and edges coincide; but what 
is the coincidence of two qualities, and how can they be 
superposed one on another in order to ensure that they 
are identical? Yet I extend to the second order of reality 
all that applies to the first. The physicist legitimates 
this operation later on by reducing, as far as possible, 
differences of quality to differences of magnitude; but, 
prior to all science, I incline to liken qualities to quantities, 
as if I perceived behind the qualities, as through a trans- 
parency, a geometrical mechanism. 1 The more complete 
this transparency, the more it seems to me that in the same 
conditions there must be a repetition of the same fact. 
Our inductions are certain, to our eyes, in the exact degree 
in which we make the qualitative differences melt into 
the homogeneity of the space which subtends them, 
so that geometry is the ideal limit of our inductions as 
well as of our deductions. The movement at the end of 
which is spatiality lays down along its course the faculty 
of induction as well as that of deduction, in fact, intel- 
lectuality entire. 

It creates them in the mind. But it creates also, in 
things, the "order" which our induction, aided by de- 

1 Op. cit. chaps, i. and ii. passim. 



m.l PHYSICAL LAWS 217 

duction, finds there. This order, on which our action 
leans and in which our intellect recognizes itself, seems to 
us marvelous. Not only do the same general causes al- 
ways produce the same general effects, but beneath the 
visible causes and effects our science discovers an infinity 
of infinitesimal changes which work more and more exactly 
into one another, the further we push the analysis: so 
much so that, at the end of this analysis, matter becomes, 
it seems to us, geometry itself. Certainly, the intellect 
is right in admiring here the growing order in the growing 
complexity; both the one and the other must have a 
positive reality for it, since it looks upon itself as positive. 
But things change their aspect when we consider the whole 
of reality as an undivided advance forward to successive 
creations. It seems to us, then, that the complexity of 
the material elements and the mathematical order that 
binds them together must arise automatically when within 
the whole a partial interruption or inversion is produced. 
Moreover, as the intellect itself is cut out of mind by a 
process of the same kind, it is attuned to this order and 
complexity, and admires them because it recognizes 
itself in them. But what is admirable in itself, what really 
deserves to provoke wonder, is the ever-renewed creation 
which reality, whole and undivided, accomplishes in ad- 
vancing; for no complication of the mathematical order 
with itself, however elaborate we may suppose it, can in- 
troduce an atom of novelty into the world, whereas this 
power of creation once given (and it exists, for we are 
conscious of it in ourselves, at least when we act freely) 
has only to be diverted from itself to relax its tension, only 
to relax its tension to extend, only to extend for the mathe- 
matical order of the elements so distinguished and the in- 
flexible determinism connecting them to manifest the inter- 
ruption of the creative act: in fact, inflexible determinism 



218 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

and mathematical order are one with this very interruption. 

It is this merely negative tendency that the particular 
laws of the physical world express. None of them, taken 
separately, has objective reality; each is the work of an 
investigator who has regarded things from a certain bias, 
isolated certain variables, applied certain conventional 
units of measurement. And yet there is an order ap- 
proximately mathematical immanent in matter, an ob- 
jective order, which our science approaches in proportion 
to its progress. For if matter is a relaxation of the in- 
extensive into the extensive and, thereby, of liberty into 
necessity, it does not indeed wholly coincide with pure 
homogeneous space, yet is constituted by the movement 
which leads to space, and is therefore on the way to ge- 
ometry. It is true that laws of mathematical form will 
never apply to it completely. For that, it would have to be 
pure space and step out of duration. 

We cannot insist too strongly that there is something 
artificial in the mathematical form of a physical law, 
and consequently in our scientific knowledge of things. 1 
Our standards of measurement are conventional, and, 
so to say, foreign to the intentions of nature: can we 
suppose that nature has related all the modalities of heat 
to the expansion of the same mass of mercury, or to the 
change of pressure of the same mass of air kept at a 
constant volume? But we may go further. In a general 
way, measuring is a wholly human operation, which 
implies that we really or ideally superpose two objects 
one on another a certain number of times. Nature did 
not dream of this superposition. It does not measure, 
nor does it count. Yet physics counts, measures, re- 
lates "quantitative" variations to one another to obtain 
laws, and it succeeds. Its success would be inexplicable, 

1 Cf . especially the profound studies of M. Ed. Le Roy in the Revue 
de me'taph. et de morale. 



in.] PHYSICAL LAWS 219 

if the movement which constitutes materiality were not 
the same movement which, prolonged by us to its end, 
that is to say, to homogeneous space, results in making 
us count, measure, follow in their respective variations terms 
that are functions one of another. To effect this prolong- 
ation of the movement, our intellect has only to let itself 
go, for it runs naturally to space and mathematics, in- 
tellectuality and materiality being of the same nature and 
having been produced in the same way. 

If the mathematical order were a positive thing, if 
there were, immanent in matter, laws comparable to 
those of our codes, the success of our science would have 
in it something of the miraculous. What chances should 
we have indeed of finding the standard of nature and of 
isolating exactly, in order to determine their reciprocal 
relations, the very variables which nature has chosen? 
But the success of a science of mathematical form would 
be no less incomprehensible, if matter did not already 
possess everything necessary to adapt itself to our formulae. 
One hypothesis only, therefore, remains plausible, namely, 
that the mathematical order is nothing positive, that it 
is the form toward which a certain interruption tends of 
itself, and that materiality consists precisely in an inter- 
ruption of this kind. We shall understand then why our 
science is contingent, relative to the variables it has chosen, 
relative to the order in which it has successively put the 
problems, and why nevertheless it succeeds. It might 
have been, as a whole, altogether different, and yet have 
succeeded. This is so, just because there is no definite 
system of mathematical laws, at the base of nature, and 
because mathematics in general represents simply the side to 
which matter inclines. Put one of those little cork dolls 
with leaden feet in any posture, lay it on its back, turn 
it up on its head, throw it into the air: it will always 



220 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

stand itself up again, automatically. So likewise with 
matter: we can take it by any end and handle it in any 
way, it will always fall back into some one of our mathe- 
matical formulae, because it is weighted with geometry. 

But the philosopher will perhaps refuse to found a 
theory of knowledge on such considerations. They will 
be repugnant to him, because the mathematical order, 
being order, will appear to him to contain something 
positive. It is in vain that we assert that this order 
produces itself automatically by the interruption of the 
inverse order, that it is this very interruption. The idea 
persists, none the less, that there might be no order at all, 
and that the mathematical order of things, being a con- 
quest over disorder, possesses a positive reality. In 
examining this point, we shall see what a prominent 
part the idea of disorder plays in problems relative to 
the theory of knowledge. It does not appear explicitly, 
and that is why it escapes our attention. It is, however, 
with the criticism of this idea that a theory of knowledge 
ought to begin, for if the great problem is to know why and 
how reality submits itself to an order, it is because the 
absence of every kind of order appears possible or con- 
ceivable. It is this absence of order that realists and 
idealists alike believe they are thinking of — the realist 
when he speaks of the regularity that "objective" laws 
actually impose on a virtual disorder of nature, the idealist 
when he supposes a " sensuous manifold" which is co- 
ordinated (and consequently itself without order) under 
the organizing influence of our understanding. The idea 
of disorder, in the sense of absence of order, is then what 
must be analyzed first. Philosophy borrows it from daily 
life. And it is unquestionable that, when ordinarily we speak 
of disorder, we are thinking of something. But of what? 



in.] THE IDEA OF DISORDER 221 

It will be seen in the next chapter how hard it is to 
determine the content of a negative idea, and what illu- 
sions one is liable to, what hopeless difficulties philosophy 
falls into, for not having undertaken this task. Diffi- 
culties and illusions are generally due to this, that we 
accept as final a manner of expression essentially pro- 
visional. They are due to our bringing into the domain 
of speculation a procedure made for practice. If I choose 
a volume in my library at random, I may put it back on 
the shelf after glancing at it and say, "This is not verse." 
Is this what I have really seen in turning over the leaves 
of the book? Obviously not. I have not seen, I never 
shall see, an absence of verse. I have seen prose. But 
as it is poetry I want, I express what I find as a function 
of what I am looking for, and instead of saying, "This is 
prose," I say, "This is not verse." In the same way, if 
the fancy takes me to read prose, and I happen on a 
volume of verse, I shall say, "This is not prose," thus ex- 
pressing the data of my perception, which shows me verse, 
in the language of my expectation and attention, which 
are fixed on the idea of prose and will hear of nothing else. 
Now, if Mons. Jourdain heard me, he would infer, no 
doubt, from my two exclamations that prose and poetry 
are two forms of language reserved for books, and that these 
learned forms have come and overlaid a language which 
was neither prose nor verse. Speaking of this thing 
which is neither verse nor prose, he would suppose, more- 
over, that he was thinking of it : it would be only a pseudo- 
idea, however. Let us go further still: the pseudo- 
idea would create a pseudo-problem, if M. Jourdain were 
to ask his professor of philosophy how the prose form and 
the poetry form have been superadded to that which 
possessed neither the one nor the other, and if he wished 
the professor to construct a theory of the imposition of 



222 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

these two forms upon this formless matter. His question 
would be absurd, and the absurdity would lie in this, that 
he was hypostasizing as the substratum of prose and poetry 
the simultaneous negation of both, forgetting that the 
negation of the one consists in the affirmation of the other. 

Now, suppose that there are two species of order, and 
that these two orders are two contraries within one and 
the same genus. Suppose also that the idea of disorder 
arises in our mind whenever, seeking one of the two kinds 
of order, we find the other. The idea of disorder would 
then have a clear meaning in the current practice of life: 
it would objectify, for the convenience of language, the 
disappointment of a mind that finds before it an order 
different from what it wants, an order with which it is not 
concerned at the moment, and which, in this sense, does 
not exist for it. But the idea would not admit a theoreti- 
cal use. So if we claim, notwithstanding, to introduce 
it into philosophy, we shall inevitably lose sight of its 
true meaning. It denotes the absence of a certain order, 
but to the 'profit of another (with which we are not con- 
cerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, 
and as it even goes and comes continually between the 
two, we take it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a 
shuttlecock between two battledores, and treat it as if it 
represented, not the absence of the one or other order as 
the case may be, but the absence of both together — a thing 
that is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal 
entity. So there arises the problem how order is imposed 
on disorder, form on matter. In analyzing the idea of 
disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that it represents 
nothing at all, and at the same time the problems that have 
been raised around it will vanish. 

It is true that we must begin by distinguishing, and 
even by opposing one to the other, two kinds of order 



in.] THE IDEA OF DISORDER 223 

which we generally confuse. As this confusion has created 
the principal difficulties of the problem of knowledge, 
it will not be useless to dwell once more on the marks by 
which the two orders are distinguished. 

In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the 
degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is there- 
fore a certain agreement between subject and object. 
It is the mind finding itself again in things. But the 
mind, we said, can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes 
it follows its natural direction: there is then progress in 
the form of tension, continuous creation, free activity. 
Sometimes it inverts it, and this inversion, pushed to 
the end, leads to extension, to the necessary reciprocal 
determination of elements externalized each by relation 
to the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism. Now, 
whether experience seems to us to adopt the first direction 
or whether it is drawn in the direction of the second, in 
both cases we say there is order, for in the two processes 
the mind finds itself again. The confusion between them 
is therefore natural. To escape it, different names would 
have to be given to the two kinds of order, and that is not 
easy, because of the variety and variability of the forms 
they take. The order of the second kind may be defined 
as geometry, which is its extreme limit; more generally, 
it is that kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation 
of necessary determination is found between causes and 
effects. It evokes ideas of inertia, of passivity, of automa- 
tism. As to the first kind of order, it oscillates no doubt 
around finality; and yet we cannot define it as finality, 
for it is sometimes above, sometimes below. In its highest 
forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work 
of art we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet 
they can only be expressed in terms of ideas approximately, 
and after the event. Life in its entirety, regarded as a 



224 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

creative evolution, is something analogous; it transcends 
finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an 
idea conceived or conceivable in advance. The category 
of finality is therefore too narrow for life in its entirety. 
It is, on the other hand, often too wide for a particular 
manifestation of life taken separately. Be that as it 
may, it is with the vital that we have here to do, and the 
whole present study strives to prove that the vital is 
in the direction of the voluntary. We may say then 
that this first kind of order is that of the vital or of the 
willed, in opposition to the second, which is that of the 
inert and the automatic. Common sense instinctively 
distinguishes between the two kinds of order, at least 
in the extreme cases; instinctively, also, it brings them 
together. We say of astronomical phenomena that 
they manifest an admirable order, meaning by this that 
they can be foreseen mathematically. And we find an 
order no less admirable in a symphony of Beethoven, 
which is genius, originality, and therefore unforeseeability 
itself. 

But it is exceptional for order of the first kind to take 
so distinct a form. Ordinarily, it presents features that 
we have every interest in confusing with those of the 
opposite order. It is quite certain, for instance, that 
if we could view the evolution of life in its entirety, the 
spontaneity of its movement and the unforeseeability 
of its procedures would thrust themselves on our at- 
tention. But what we meet in our daily experience is a 
certain determinate living being, certain special mani- 
festations of life, which repeat, almost, forms and facts 
already known; indeed, the similarity of structure that we 
find everywhere between what generates and what is 
generated — a similarity that enables us to include any 
number of living individuals in the same group — is to our 



hi.) LAWS AND GENERA 225 

eyes the very type of the generic: the inorganic genera 
seem to us to take living genera as models. Thus the 
vital order, such as it is offered to us piecemeal in experi- 
ence, presents the same character and performs the same 
function as the physical order: both cause experience to 
repeat itself, both enable our mind to generalize. In reality, 
this character has entirely different origins in the two 
cases, and even opposite meanings. In the second case, 
the type of this character, its ideal limit, as also its founda- 
tion, is the geometrical necessity in virtue of which the 
same components give the same resultant. In the first 
case, this character involves, on the contrary, the interven- 
tion of something which manages to obtain the same 
total effect although the infinitely complex elementary 
causes may be quite different. We insisted on this last 
point in our first chapter, when we showed how identical 
structures are to be met with on independent lines of evo- 
lution. But, without looking so far, we may presume 
that the reproduction only of the type of the ancestor 
by his descendants is an entirely different thing from the 
repetition of the same composition of forces which yields 
an identical resultant. When we think of the infinity 
of infinitesimal elements and of infinitesimal causes that 
concur in the genesis of a living being, when we reflect 
that the absence or the deviation of one of them would 
spoil everything, the first impulse of the mind is to consider 
this army of little workers as watched over by a skilled 
foreman, the "vital principle," which is ever repairing 
faults, correcting effects of neglect or absentmindedness, 
putting things back in place : this is how we try to express 
the difference between the physical and the vital order, 
the former making the same combination of causes give 
the same combined effect, the latter securing the con- 
stancy of the effect even when there is some wavering 



226 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in the causes. But that is only a comparison; on re- 
flection, we find that there can be no foreman, for the 
very simple reason that there are no workers. The causes 
and elements that physico-chemical analysis discovers 
are real causes and elements, no doubt, as far as the facts 
of organic destruction are concerned; they are then 
limited in number. But vital phenomena, properly so 
called, or facts of organic creation open up to us, when we 
analyze them, the perspective of an analysis passing away 
to infinity: whence it may be inferred that the manifold 
causes and elements are here only views of the mind, at- 
tempting an ever closer and closer imitation of the operation 
of nature, while the operation imitated is an indivisible 
act. The likeness between individuals of the same species 
has thus an entirely different meaning, an entirely different 
origin, to that of the likeness between complex effects ob- 
tained by the same composition of the same causes. But 
in the one case as in the other, there is likeness, and 
consequently possible generalization. And as that is 
all that interests us in practice, since our daily life is and 
must be an expectation of the same things and the same 
situations, it is natural that this common character, 
essential from the point of view of our action, should bring 
the two orders together, in spite of a merely internal 
diversity between them which interests speculation only. 
Hence the idea of a general order of nature, everywhere the 
same, hovering over life and over matter alike. Hence 
our habit of designating by the same word and represent- 
ing in the same way the existence of laws in the domain 
of inert matter and that of genera in the domain of life. 

Now, it will be found that this confusion is the origin 
of most of the difficulties raised by the problem of know- 
ledge, among the ancients as well as among the moderns. 
The generality of laws and that of genera having been 



in.] LAWS AND GENERA 227 

designated by the same word and subsumed under the same 
idea, the geometrical order and the vital order are accord- 
ingly confused together. According to the point of view, 
the generality of laws is explained by that of genera, or 
that of genera by that of laws. The first view is character- 
istic of ancient thought; the second belongs to modern 
philosophy. But in both ancient and modern philosophy 
the idea of "generality" is an equivocal idea, uniting in its 
denotation and in its connotation incompatible objects 
and elements. In both there are grouped under the same 
concept two kinds of order which are alike only in the 
facility they give to our action on things. We bring 
together the two terms in virtue of a quite external like- 
ness, which justifies no doubt their designation by the 
same word for practice, but which does not authorize 
us at all, in the speculative domain, to confuse them in 
the same definition. 

The ancients, indeed, did not ask why nature submits 
to laws, but why it is ordered according to genera. The 
idea of genus corresponds more especially to an objective 
reality in the domain of life, where it expresses an un- 
questionable fact, heredity. Indeed, there can only be 
genera where there are individual objects; now, while 
the organized being is cut out from the general mass of 
matter by his very organization, that is to say naturally, 
it is our perception which cuts inert matter into distinct 
bodies. It is guided in this by the interests of action, 
by the nascent reactions that our body indicates — that is, 
as we have shown elsewhere, 1 by the potential genera 
that are trying to gain existence. In this, then, genera 
and individuals determine one another by a semi-artificial 
operation entirely relative to our future action on things. 
Nevertheless the ancients did not hesitate to put all genera 
1 Matiere et mimoire, chapters iii. and iv. 



228 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in the same rank, to attribute the same absolute existence 
to all of them. Reality thus being a system of genera, 
it is to the generality of the genera (that is, in effect, to 
the generality expressive of the vital order) that the 
generality of laws itself had to be brought. It is interest- 
ing, in this respect, to compare the Aristotelian theory 
of the fall of bodies with the explanation furnished by 
Galileo. Aristotle is concerned solely with the concepts 
"high" and "low," "own proper place" as distinguished 
from "place occupied," "natural movement" and "forced 
movement;" 1 the physical law in virtue of which the stone 
falls expresses for him that the stone regains the "natural 
place" of all stones, to wit, the earth. The stone, in his 
view, is not quite stone so long as it is not in its normal 
place; in falling back into this place it aims at complet- 
ing itself, like a living being that grows, thus realizing 
fully the essence of the genus stone. 2 If this concep- 
tion of the physical law were exact, the law would no 
longer be a mere relation established by the mind; the 
subdivision of matter into bodies would no longer be 
relative to our faculty of perceiving; all bodies would 
have the same individuality as living bodies, and the 
laws of the physical universe would express relations 
of real kinship between real genera. We know what 
kind of physics grew out of this, and how, for having 
believed in a science unique and final, embracing the 
totality of the real and at one with the absolute, the 
ancients were confined, in fact, to a more or less clumsy 
interpretation of the physical in terms of the vital. 

But there is the same confusion in the moderns, with 
this difference, however, that the relation between the 

1 See in particular, Phys., iv. 215 a 2; v. 230 b 12; viii. 255 a 2; and 
De Caelo, iv. 1-5; ii. 296 b 27; iv. 308 a 34. 

2 De Caelo, iv. 310 a 34 to d'scs zbv auzou zo'nov (pkpzdac enaozov zo 
ecs zb auzou efdos laze cpepsadac. 



nil LAWS AND GENERA 229 

two terms is inverted: laws are no longer reduced to genera, 
but genera to laws; and science, still supposed to be 
uniquely one, becomes altogether relative, instead of 
being, as the ancients wished, altogether at one with 
the absolute. A noteworthy fact is the eclipse of the 
problem of genera in modern philosophy. Our theory 
of knowledge turns almost entirely on the question of 
laws: genera are left to make shift with laws as best 
they can. The reason is, that modern philosophy has 
its point of departure in the great astronomical and physical 
discoveries of modern times. The laws of Kepler and of 
Galileo have remained for it the ideal and unique type 
of all knowledge. Now, a law is a relation between things 
or between facts. More precisely, a law of mathematical 
form expresses the fact that a certain magnitude is a 
function of one or several other variables appropriately 
chosen. Now, the choice of the variable magnitudes, 
the distribution of nature into objects and into facts, has 
already something of the contingent and the conventional. 
But, admitting that the choice is hinted at, if not prescribed, 
by experience, the law remains none the less a relation, 
and a relation is essentially a comparison; it has objective 
reality only for an intelligence that represents to itself 
several terms at the same time. This intelligence may be 
neither mine nor yours : a science which bears on laws may 
therefore be an objective science, which experience con- 
tains in advance and which we simply make it disgorge; 
but it is none the less true that a comparison of some kind 
must be effected here, impersonally if not by any one 
in particular, and that an experience made of laws, that 
is, of terms related to other terms, is an experience made of 
comparisons, which, before we receive it, has already had to 
pass through an atmosphere of intellectuality. The idea 
of a science and of an experience entirely relative to the 



230 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

human understanding was therefore implicitly contained 
in the conception of a science one and integral, composed 
of laws: Kant only brought it to light. But this con- 
ception is the result of an arbitrary confusion between the 
generality of laws and that of genera. Though an in- 
telligence be necessary to condition terms by relation to 
each other, we may conceive that in certain cases the terms 
themselves may exist independently. And if, beside 
relations of term to term, experience also presents to us 
independent terms, the living genera being something 
quite different from systems of laws, one half, at least, 
of our knowledge bears on the "thing-in-itself," the very 
reality. This knowledge may be very difficult, just be- 
cause it no longer builds up its own object and is obliged, 
on the contrary, to submit to it ; but, however little it cuts 
into its object, it is into the absolute itself that it bites. 
We may go further: the other half of knowledge is no 
longer so radically, so definitely relative as certain philoso- 
phers say, if we can establish that it bears on a reality 
of inverse order, a reality which we always express in 
mathematical laws, that is to say in relations that imply 
comparisons, but which lends itself to this work only 
because it is weighted with spatiality and consequently 
with geometry. Be that as it may, it is the confusion of 
two kinds of order that lies behind the relativism of the 
moderns, as it lay behind the dogmatism of the ancients. 
We have said enough to mark the origin of this con- 
fusion. It is due to the fact that the "vital" order, which 
is essentially creation, is manifested to us less in its essence 
than in some of its accidents, those which imitate the 
physical and geometrical order; like it, they present to 
us repetitions that make generalization possible, and in 
that we have all that interests us. There is no doubt 
that life as a whole is an evolution, that is, an unceasing 



ra.] LAWS AND GENERA 231 

transformation. But life can progress only by means of 
the living, which are its depositaries. Innumerable living 
beings, almost alike, have to repeat each other in space 
and in time for the novelty they are working out to grow 
and mature. It is like a book that advances towards a 
new edition by going through thousands of reprints with 
thousands of copies. There is, however, this difference 
between the two cases, that the successive impressions 
are identical, as well as the simultaneous copies of the 
same impression, whereas representatives of one and 
the same species are never entirely the same, either in 
different points of space or at different moments of time. 
Heredity does not only transmit characters; it transmits 
also the impetus in virtue of which the characters are 
modified, and this impetus is vitality itself. That is why 
we say that the repetition which serves as the base of our 
generalizations is essential in the physical order, accidental 
in the vital order. The physical order is " automatic;" 
the vital order is, I will not say voluntary, but analogous 
to the order "willed." 

Now, as soon as we have clearly distinguished be- 
tween the order that is " willed" and the order that is 
"automatic," the ambiguity that underlies the idea of 
disorder is dissipated, and, with it, one of the principal 
difficulties of the problem of knowledge. 

The main problem of the theory of knowledge is to 
know how science is possible, that is to say, in effect, 
why there is order and not disorder in things. That 
order exists is a fact. But, on the other hand, disorder, 
which appears to us to be less than order, is, it seems, of 
right. The existence of order is then a mystery to be 
cleared up, at any rate a problem to be solved. More 
simply, when we undertake to found order, we regard 
it as contingent, if not in things, at least as viewed by 



232 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

the mind: of a thing that we do not judge to be contingent 
we do not require an explanation. If order did not appear 
to us as a conquest over something, or as an addition to 
something (which something is thought to be the "ab- 
sence of order"), ancient realism would not have spoken 
of a "matter" to which the Idea superadded itself, nor 
would modern idealism have supposed a "sensuous mani- 
fold" that the understanding organizes into nature. Now, 
it is unquestionable that all order is contingent, and 
conceived as such. But contingent in relation to what? 
The reply, to our thinking, is not doubtful. An order 
is contingent, and seems so, in relation to the inverse 
order, as verse is contingent in relation to prose and prose 
in relation to verse. But, just as all speech which is not 
prose is verse and necessarily conceived as verse, just as 
all speech which is not verse is prose and necessarily con- 
ceived as prose, so any state of things that is not one of 
the two orders is the other and is necessarily conceived as 
the other. But it may happen that we do not realize 
what we are actually thinking of, and perceive the idea 
really present to our mind only through a mist of affective 
states. Any one can be convinced of this by considering 
the use we make of the idea of disorder in daily life. When 
I enter a room and pronounce it to be "in disorder," what 
do I mean? The position of each object is explained by the 
automatic movements of the person who has slept in the 
room, or by the efficient causes, whatever they may be, 
that have caused each article of furniture, clothing, etc., 
to be where it is: the order, in the second sense of the 
word, is perfect. But it is order of the first kind that 
I am expecting, the order that a methodical person con- 
sciously puts into his life, the willed order and not the 
automatic: so I call the absence of this order "disorder." 
At bottom, all there is that is real, perceived and even 



m.l THE TWO KINDS OF ORDER 233 

conceived, in this absence of one of the two kinds of order, 
is the presence of the other. But the second is indifferent 
to me, / am interested only in the first, and I express the 
presence of the second as a function of the first, instead 
of expressing it, so to speak, as a function of itself, by 
saying it is disorder. Inversely, when we affirm that we 
are imagining a chaos, that is to say a state of things in 
which the physical world no longer obeys laws, what are we 
thinking of? We imagine facts that appear and disappear 
capriciously. First we think of the physical universe as 
we know it, with effects and causes well proportioned to 
each other; then, by a series of arbitrary decrees, we aug- 
ment, diminish, suppress, so as to obtain what we call 
disorder. Id reality we have substituted will for the 
mechanism of nature; we have replaced the "automatic 
order" by a multitude of elementary wills, just to the extent 
that we imagine the apparition or vanishing of phenomena. 
No doubt, for all these little wills to constitute a "willed 
order," they must have accepted the direction of a higher 
will. But, on looking closely at them, we see that that is 
just what they do: our own will is there, which objectifies 
itself in each of these capricious wills in turn, and takes 
good care not to connect the same with the same, nor to 
permit the effect to be proportional to the cause — in fact 
makes one simple intention hover over the whole of the 
elementary volitions. Thus, here again, the absence 
of one of the two orders consists in the presence of the 
other. In analyzing the idea of chance, which is closely 
akin to the idea of disorder, we find the same elements. 
When the wholly mechanical play of the causes which stop 
the wheel on a number makes me win, and consequently 
acts like a good genius, careful of my interests, or when 
the wholly mechanical force of the wind tears a tile off 
the roof and throws it on to my head, that is to say acts like 



234 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

a bad genius, conspiring against my person: in both cases 
I find a mechanism where I should have looked for, where, 
indeed, it seems as if I ought to have found, an intention. 
That is what I express in speaking of chance. And of an 
anarchical world, in which phenomena succeed each other 
capriciously, I should say again that it is a realm of chance, 
meaning that I find before me wills, or rather decrees, 
when what I am expecting is mechanism. Thus is ex- 
plained the singular vacillation of the mind when it tries 
to define chance. Neither efficient cause nor final cause 
can furnish the definition sought. The mind swings to 
and fro, unable to rest, between the idea of an absence of 
final cause and that of an absence of efficient cause, each 
of these definitions sending it back to the other. The 
problem remains insoluble, in fact, so long as the idea of 
chance is regarded as a pure idea, without mixture of feel- 
ing. But, in reality, chance merely objectifies the state 
of mind of one who, expecting one of the two kinds of 
order, finds himself confronted with the other. Chance 
and disorder are therefore necessarily conceived as relative. 
So if we wish to represent them to ourselves as absolute, 
we perceive that we are going to and fro like a shuttle 
between the two kinds of order, passing into the one just 
at the moment at which we might catch ourself in the 
other, and that the supposed absence of all order is really 
the presence of both, with, besides, the swaying of a mind 
that cannot rest finally in either. Neither in things 
nor in our idea of things can there be any question of 
presenting this disorder as the substratum of order, since 
it implies the two kinds of order and is made of their 
combination. 

But our intelligence is not stopped by this. By a 
simple sic jubeo it posits a disorder which is an "absence 
of order." In so doing it thinks a word or a set of words, 



in.] THE TWO KINDS OF ORDER 235 

nothing more. If it seeks to attach an idea to the word, 
it finds that disorder may indeed be the negation of order, 
but that this negation is then the implicit affirmation of the 
presence of the opposite order, which we shut our eyes to 
because it does not interest us, or which we evade by deny- 
ing the second order in its turn — that is, at bottom, by 
re-establishing the first. How can we speak, then, of an 
incoherent diversity which an understanding organizes? 
It is no use for us to say that no one supposes this inco- 
herence to be realized or realizable: when we speak of it, 
we believe we are thinking of it; now, in analyzing the 
idea actually present, we find, as we said before, only the 
disappointment of the mind confronted with an order that 
does not interest it, or a swaying of the mind between 
two kinds of order, or, finally, the idea pure and simple 
of the empty word that we have created by joining a 
negative prefix to a word which itself signifies some- 
thing. But it is this analysis that we neglect to make. 
We omit it, precisely because it does not occur to us to 
distinguish two kinds of order that are irreducible to one 
another. 

We said, indeed, that all order necessarily appears 
as contingent. If there are two kinds of order, this con- 
tingency of order is explained: one of the forms is con- 
tingent in relation to the other. Where I find the geo- 
metrical order, the vital was possible; where the order is 
vital, it might have been geometrical. But suppose that 
the order is everywhere of the same kind, and simply admits 
of degrees which go from the geometrical to the vital: 
if a determinate order still appears to me to be contingent, 
and can no longer be so by relation to an order of another 
kind, I shall necessarily believe that the order is contingent 
by relation to an absence of itself, that is to say by relation 
to. a state of things "in which there is no order at all," 



236 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

And this state of things I shall believe that I am think- 
ing of, because it is implied, it seems, in the very con- 
tingency of order, which is an unquestionable fact. I 
shall therefore place at the summit of the hierarchy the 
vital order; then, as a diminution or lower complication 
of it, the geometrical order; and finally, at the bottom of 
all, an absence of order, incoherence itself, on which order 
is superposed. This is why incoherence has the effect 
on me of a word behind which there must be something 
real, if not in things, at least in thought. But if I observe 
that the state of things implied by the contingency of a 
determinate order is simply the presence of the contrary 
order, and if by this very fact I posit two kinds of order, 
each the inverse of the other, I perceive that no inter- 
mediate degrees can be imagined between the two orders, 
and that there is no going down from the two orders to 
the "incoherent." Either the incoherent is only a word, 
devoid of meaning, or, if I give it a meaning, it is on con- 
dition of putting incoherence midway between the two 
orders, and not below both of them. There is not first 
the incoherent, then the geometrical, then the vital: 
there is only the geometrical and the vital, and then, by a 
swaying of the mind between them, the idea of the in- 
coherent. To speak of an uncoordinated diversity to 
which order is superadded is therefore to commit a veritable 
petitio principii; for in imagining the uncoordinated we 
really posit an order, or rather two. 

This long analysis was necessary to show how the real 
can pass from tension to extension and from freedom to 
mechanical necessity by way of inversion. It was not 
enough to prove that this relation between the two terms 
is suggested to us, at once, by consciousness and by sensible 
experience. It was necessary to prove that the geometrical 



iii.j IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 237 

order has no need of explanation, being purely and simply 
the suppression of the inverse order. And, for that, it 
was indispensable to prove that suppression is always a 
substitution and is even necessarily conceived as such: 
it is the requirements of practical life alone that suggest 
to us here a way of speaking that deceives us both as to 
what happens in things and as to what is present to our 
thought. We must now examine more closely the in- 
version whose consequences we have just described. 
What, then, is the principle that has only to let go its 
tension — may we say to detend — in order to extend, the 
interruption of the cause here being equivalent to a re- 
versal of the effect? 

For want of a better word we have called it consciousness. 
But we do not mean the narrowed consciousness that 
functions in each of us. Our own consciousness is the con- 
sciousness of a certain living being, placed in a certain 
point of space; and though it does indeed move in the same 
direction as its principle, it is continually drawn the op- 
posite way, obliged, though it goes forward, to look be- 
hind. This retrospective vision is, as we have shown, 
the natural function of the intellect, and consequently 
of distinct consciousness. In order that our consciousness 
shall coincide with something of its principle, it must 
detach itself from the already-made and attach itself to the 
being-made. It needs that, turning back on itself and 
twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be made to 
be one with the act of willing — a painful effort which we 
can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature, but 
cannot sustain more than a few moments. In free action, 
when we contract our whole being in order to thrust it 
forward, we have the more or less clear consciousness 
of motives and of impelling forces, and even, at rare mo- 
ments, of the becoming by which they are organized into 



238 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

an act: but the pure willing, the current that runs through 
this matter, communicating life to it, is a thing which we 
hardly feel, which at most we brush lightly as it passes. 
Let us try, however, to instal ourselves within it, if only for 
a moment; even then it is an individual and fragmentary 
will that we grasp. To get to the principle of all life, as 
also of all materiality, we must go further still. Is it 
impossible? No, by no means; the history of philosophy 
is there to bear witness. There is no durable system that 
is not, at least in some of its parts, vivified by intuition. 
Dialectic is necessary to put intuition to the proof, necessary 
also in order that intuition should break itself up into 
concepts and so be propagated to other men; but all it 
does, often enough, is to develop the result of that intuition 
which transcends it. The truth is, the two procedures 
are of opposite direction: the same effort, by which ideas 
are connected with ideas, causes the intuition which the 
ideas were storing up to vanish. The philosopher is 
obliged to abandon intuition, once he has received from 
it the impetus, and to rely on himself to carry on the 
movement by pushing the concepts one after another. 
But he soon feels he has lost foothold; he must come 
into touch with intuition again; he must undo most of 
what he has done. In short, dialectic is what ensures 
the agreement of our thought with itself. But by dia- 
lectic — which is only a relaxation of intuition — many 
different agreements are possible, while there is only 
one truth. Intuition, if it could be prolonged beyond 
a few instants, would not only make the philosopher 
agree with his own thought, but also all philosophers 
with each other. Such as it is, fugitive and incomplete, 
it is, in each system, what is worth more than the system 
and survives it. The object of philosophy would be 
reached if this intuition could be sustained, generalized 



in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 239 

and, above all, assured of external points of reference in 
order not to go astray. To that end a continual coming 
and going is necessary between nature and mind. 

When we put back our being into our will, and our 
will itself into the impulsion it prolongs, we understand, 
we feel, that reality is a perpetual growth, a creation 
pursued without end. Our will already performs this 
miracle. Every human work in which there is invention, 
every voluntary act in which there is freedom, every 
movement of an organism that manifests spontaneity, 
brings something new into the world. True, these are 
only creations of form. How could they be anything 
else? We are not the vital current itself; we are this 
current already loaded with matter, that is, with con- 
gealed parts of its own substance which it carries along 
its course. In the composition of a work of genius, as 
in a simple free decision, we do, indeed, stretch the spring 
of our activity to the utmost and thus create what no mere 
assemblage of materials could have given (what assemblage 
of curves already known can ever be equivalent to the 
pencil-stroke of a great artist?) but there are, none the 
less, elements here that pre-exist and survive their or- 
ganization. But if a simple arrest of the action that 
generates form could constitute matter (are not the original 
lines drawn by the artist themselves already the fixation 
and, as it were, congealment of a movement?), a creation 
of matter would be neither incomprehensible nor inad- 
missible. For we seize from within, we live at every 
instant, a creation of form, and it is just in those cases 
in which the form is pure, and in which the creative current 
is momentarily interrupted, that there is a creation of 
matter. Consider the letters of the alphabet that enter 
into the composition of everything that has ever been 
written: we do not conceive that new letters spring up 



240 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

and come to join themselves to the others in order to 
make a new poem. But that the poet creates the poem 
and that human thought is thereby made richer, we under- 
stand very well: this creation is a simple act of the mind, 
and action has only to make a pause, instead of continuing 
into a new creation, in order that, of itself, it may break 
up into words which dissociate themselves into letters 
which are added to all the letters there are already in the 
world. Thus, that the number of atoms composing the 
material universe at a given moment should increase runs 
counter to our habits of mind, contradicts the whole of 
our experience; but that a reality of quite another order, 
which contrasts with the atom as the thought of the poet 
with the letters of the alphabet, should increase by sudden 
additions, is not inadmissible; and the reverse of each 
addition might indeed be a world, which we then represent 
to ourselves, symbolically, as an assemblage of atoms. 

The mystery that spreads over the existence of the 
universe comes in great part from this, that we want the 
genesis of it to have been accomplished at one stroke or 
the whole of matter to be eternal. Whether we speak of 
creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality 
of the universe that we are considering at once. At the 
root of this habit of mind lies the prejudice which we 
will analyze in our next chapter, the idea, common to 
materialists and to their opponents, that there is no really 
acting duration, and that the absolute — matter or mind — 
can have no place in concrete time, in the time which we 
feel to be the very stuff of our life. From which it follows 
that everything is given once for all, and that it is necessary 
to posit from all eternity either material multiplicity it- 
self, or the act creating this multiplicity, given in block 
in the divine essence. Once this prejudice is eradicated, 
the idea of creation becomes more clear, for it is merged 



in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 241 

in that of growth. But it is no longer then of the universe 
in its totality that we must speak. 

Why should we speak of it? The universe is an as- 
semblage of solar systems which we have every reason 
to believe analogous to our own. No doubt they are not 
absolutely independent of one another. Our sun radiates 
heat and light beyond the farthest planet, and, on the 
other hand, our entire solar system is moving in a definite 
direction as if it were drawn. There is, then, a bond 
between the worlds. But this bond may be regarded as 
infinitely loose in comparison with the mutual dependence 
which unites the parts of the same world among them- 
selves; so that it is not artificially, for reasons of mere 
convenience, that we isolate our solar system: nature 
itself invites us to isolate it. As living beings, we depend 
on the planet on which we are, and on the sun that pro- 
vides for it, but on nothing else. As thinking beings, 
we may apply the laws of our physics to our own world, 
and extend them to each of the worlds taken separately; 
but nothing tells us that they apply to the entire universe, 
nor even that such an affirmation has any meaning; for 
the universe is not made, but is being made continually. 
It is growing, perhaps indefinitely, by the addition of new 
worlds, --vjj 

Let us extend, then, to the whole of our solar system 
the two most general laws of our science, the principle of 
conservation of energy and that of its degradation- 
limiting them, however, to this relatively closed system 
and to other systems relatively closed. Let us see what 
will follow. We must remark, first of all, that these two 
principles have not the same metaphysical scope. The 
first is a quantitative law, and consequently relative, 
in part, to our methods of measurement. It says that, 
in a system presumed to be closed, the total energy, that 



242 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

is to say the sum of its kinetic and potential energy, re- 
mains constant. Now, if there were only kinetic energy 
in the world, or even if there were, besides kinetic energy, 
only one single kind of potential energy, but no more, the 
artifice of measurement would not make the law artificial. 
The law of the conservation of energy would express indeed 
that something is preserved in constant quantity. But 
there are, in fact, energies of various kinds, 1 and the meas- 
urement of each of them has evidently been so chosen as 
to justify the principle of conservation of energy. Con- 
vention, therefore, plays a large part in this principle, 
although there is undoubtedly, between the variations 
of the different energies composing one and the same 
system, a mutual dependence which is just what has 
made the extension of the principle possible by measure- 
ments suitably chosen. If, therefore, the philosopher 
applies this principle to the solar system complete, he 
must at least soften its outlines. The law of the con- 
servation of energy cannot here express the objective 
permanence of a certain quantity of a certain thing, 
but rather the necessity for every change that is brought 
about to be counterbalanced in some way by a change 
in an opposite direction. That is to say, even if it governs 
the whole of our solar system, the law of the conservation 
of energy is concerned with the relationship of a fragment 
of this world to another fragment rather than with the 
nature of the whole. 

It is otherwise with the second principle of thermo- 
dynamics. The law of the degradation of energy does 
not bear essentially on magnitudes. No doubt the first 
idea of it arose, in the thought of Carnot, out of cer- 
tain quantitative considerations on the yield of thermic 

1 On these differences of quality see the work of Duhem, L'Evolution 
de la micanique, Paris, 1905, pp. 197 ff. 



m.i IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 243 

machines. Unquestionably, too, the terms in which 
Clausius generalized it were mathematical, and a cal- 
culable magnitude, "entropy," was, in fact, the final 
conception to which he was led. Such precision is necessary 
for practical applications. But the law might have been 
vaguely conceived, and, if absolutely necessary, it might 
have been roughly formulated, even though no one had 
ever thought of measuring the different energies of the 
physical world, even though the concept of energy had 
not been created. Essentially, it expresses the fact that 
all physical changes have a tendency to be degraded into 
heat, and that heat tends to be distributed among bodies 
in a uniform manner. In this less precise form, it becomes 
independent of any convention; it is the most metaphysi- 
cal of the laws of physics since it points out without inter- 
posed symbols, without artificial devices of measurements, 
the direction in which the world is going. It tells us that 
changes that are visible and heterogeneous will be more and 
more diluted into changes that are invisible and homo- 
geneous, and that the instability to which we owe the rich- 
ness and variety of the changes taking place in our solar 
system will gradually give way to the relative stability 
of elementary vibrations continually and perpetually 
repeated. Just so with a man who keeps up his strength 
as he grows old, but spends it less and less in actions, and 
comes, in the end, to employ it entirely in making his lungs 
breathe and his heart beat. 

From this point of view, a world like our solar system 
is seen to be ever exhausting something of the muta- 
bility it contains. In the beginning, it had the maximum of 
possible utilization of energy: this mutability has gone 
on diminishing unceasingly. Whence does it come? We 
might at first suppose that it has come from some other 
point of space, but the difficulty is only set back, and for 



244 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

this external source of mutability the same question springs 
up. True, it might be added that the number of worlds 
capable of passing mutability to each other is unlimited, 
that the sum of mutability contained in the universe is in- 
finite, that there is therefore no ground on which to seek its 
origin or to foresee its end. A hypothesis of this kind is as 
irrefutable as it is indemonstrable; but to speak of an infinite 
universe is to admit a perfect coincidence of matter with 
abstract space, and consequently an absolute externality 
of all the parts of matter in relation to one another. We 
have seen above what we must think of this theory, and 
how difficult it is to reconcile with the idea of a reciprocal 
influence of all the parts of matter on one another, an 
influence to which indeed it itself makes appeal. Again it 
might be supposed that the general instability has arisen 
from a general state of stability; that the period in 
which we now are, and in which the utilizable energy is 
diminishing, has been preceded by a period in which 
the mutability was increasing, and that the alternations 
of increase and diminution succeed each other for ever. 
This hypothesis is theoretically conceivable, as has been 
demonstrated quite recently; but, according to the cal- 
culations of Boltzmann, the mathematical improbabil- 
ity of it passes all imagination and practically amounts 
to absolute impossibility. 1 In reality, the problem re- 
mains insoluble as long as we keep on the ground of physics, 
for the physicist is obliged to attach energy to extended 
particles, and, even if he regards the particles only as 
reservoirs of energy, he remains in space: he would belie 
his role if he sought the origin of these energies in an extra- 
spatial process. It is there, however, in our opinion, that 
it must be sought. 
Is it extension in general that we are considering in 

1 Boltzmann, Vorlesungen uber Gastheorie, Leipzig, 1898, pp. 253 ff. 



in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 245 

abstractor Extension, we said, appears only as a tension 
which is interrupted. Or, are we considering the con- 
crete reality that fills this extension? The order which 
reigns there, and which is manifested by the laws of nature, 
is an order which must be born of itself when the inverse 
order is suppressed; a detension of the will would produce 
precisely this suppression. Lastly, we find that the 
direction, which this reality takes, suggests to us the idea 
of a thing unmaking itself; such, no doubt, is one of the 
essential characters of materiality. What conclusion are 
we to draw from all this, if not that the process by which 
this thing makes itself is directed in a contrary way to that 
of physical processes, and that it is therefore, by its very 
definition, immaterial? The vision we have of the material 
world is that of a weight which falls : no image drawn from 
matter, properly so called, will ever give us the idea of the 
weight rising. But this conclusion will come home to us 
with still greater force if we press nearer to the concrete 
reality, and if we consider, no longer only matter in general, 
but, within this matter, living bodies. 

All our analyses show us, in life, an effort to re-mount 
the incline that matter descends. In that, they reveal 
to us the possibility, the necessity even of a process 
the inverse of materiality, creative of matter by its in- 
terruption alone. The fife that evolves on the surface 
of our planet is indeed attached to matter. If it were 
pure consciousness, a fortiori if it were supraconscious- 
ness, it would be pure creative activity. In fact, it is 
riveted to an organism that subjects it to the general 
laws of inert matter. But everything happens as if it 
were doing its utmost to set itself free from these laws. 
It has not the power to reverse the direction of physical 
changes, such as the principle of Carnot determines it. 
It does, however, behave absolutely as a force would 



246 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

behave which, left to itself, would work in the inverse 
direction. Incapable of stopping the course of material 
changes downwards, it succeeds in retarding it. The 
evolution of life really continues, as we have shown, 
an initial impulsion: this impulsion, which has deter- 
mined the development of the chlorophyllian function 
in the plant and of the sensori-motor system in the ani- 
mal, brings life to more and more efficient acts by the 
fabrication and use of more and more powerful explosives. 
Now, what do these explosives represent if not a storing- 
up of the solar energy, the degradation of which energy 
is thus provisionally suspended on some of the points 
where it was being poured forth? The usable energy which 
the explosive conceals will be expended, of course, at the 
moment of the explosion; but it would have been expended 
sooner if an organism had not happened to be there to 
arrest its dissipation, in order to retain it and save it up. 
As we see it to-day, at the point to which it was brought 
by a scission of the mutually complementary tendencies 
which it contained within itself, life is entirely dependent 
on the chlorophyllian function of the plant. This means 
that, looked at in its initial impulsion, before any scission, 
life was a tendency to accumulate in a reservoir, as do 
especially the green parts of vegetables, with a view 
to an instantaneous effective discharge, like that which 
an animal brings about, something that would have 
otherwise flowed away. It is like an effort to raise the 
weight which falls. True, it succeeds only in retarding 
the fall. But at least it can give us an idea of what the 
raising of the weight was. 1 

1 In a book rich in fact3 and in ideas (La Dissolution opposee a I 'evolution, 
Paris, 1899), M. Andre Lalande shows us everything going towards 
death, in spite of the momentary resistance which organisms seem 
to oppose. — But, even from the side of unorganized matter, have we 
the right to extend to the entire universe considerations drawn from 



in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 247 

Let us imagine a vessel full of steam at a high pressure, 
and here and there in its sides a crack through which the 
steam is escaping in a jet. The steam thrown into the air 
is nearly all condensed into little drops which fall back, and 
this condensation and this fall represent simply the loss 
of something, an interruption, a deficit. But a small 
part of the jet of steam subsists, uncondensed, for some 
Seconds; it is making an effort to raise the drops which 
are falling; it succeeds at most in retarding their fall. 
So, from an immense reservoir of life, jets must be gushing 
out unceasingly, of which each, falling back, is a world. 
The evolution of living species within this world repre- 
sents what subsists of the primitive direction of the 
original jet, and of an impulsion which continues itself 
in a direction the inverse of materiality. But let us 
not carry too far this comparison. It gives us but a 
feeble and even deceptive image of reality, for the crack, 
the jet of steam, the forming of the drops, are deter- 
mined necessarily, whereas the creation of a world is 
a free act, and the life within the material world partici- 
pates in this liberty. Let us think rather of an action 
like that of raising the arm; then let us suppose that 
the arm, left to itself, falls back, and yet that there sub- 
sists in it, striving to raise it up again, something of the 
will that animates it. In this image of a creative action 
which unmakes itself we have already a more exact re- 

the present state of our solar system? Beside the worlds which are 
dying, there are without doubt worlds that are being born. On the 
other hand, in the organized world, the death of individuals does not 
seem at all like a diminution of "life in general," or like a necessity 
which life submits to reluctantly. As has been more than onee re- 
marked, life has never made an effort to prolong indefinitely the exist- 
ence of the individual, although on so many other points it has made 
so many successful efforts. Everything is as if this death had been 
willed, or at least accepted, f^r the greater progress of life in general. 



248 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

presentation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, 
that which subsists of the direct movement in the inverted 
movement, a reality which is making itself in a reality 
which is unmaking itself. 

Everything is obscure in the idea of creation if we 
think of things which are created and a thing which creates, 
as we habitually do, as the understanding cannot help 
doing. We shall show the origin of this illusion in our 
next chapter. It is natural to our intellect, whose function 
is essentially practical, made to present to us things and 
states rather than changes and acts. But things and 
states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. 
There are no things, there are only actions. More particu- 
larly, if I consider the world in which we live, I find that 
the automatic and strictly determined evolution of this 
well-knit whole is action which is unmaking itself, and that 
the unforeseen forms which life cuts out in it, forms capable 
of being themselves prolonged into unforeseen movements, 
represent the action that is making itself. Now, I have 
every reason to believe that the other worlds are analogous 
to ours, that things happen there in the same way. And 
I know they were not all constructed at the same time, 
since observation shows me, even to-day, nebulae in 
course of concentration. Now, if the same kind of action 
is going on everywhere, whether it is that which is unmaking 
itself or whether it is that which is striving to remake 
itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I 
speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets 
in a fire-works display — provided, however, that I do not 
present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shoot- 
ing out. God thus defined, has nothing of the already 
made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, 
so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in our- 
selves when we act freely. That new things can join 



in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 249 

things already existing is absurd, no doubt, since the 
thing results from a solidification performed by our under- 
standing, and there are never any things other than those 
that the understanding has thus constituted. To speak 
of things creating themselves would therefore amount 
to saying that the understanding presents to itself more 
than it presents to itself— a self-contradictory affirmation, 
an empty and vain idea. But that action increases as it 
goes on, that it creates in the measure of its advance, 
is what each of us finds when he watches himself act. 
Things are constituted by the instantaneous cut which 
the understanding practices, at a given moment, on a flux 
of this kind, and what is mysterious when we eompare 
the cuts together becomes clear when we relate them to 
the flux. Indeed, the modalities of creative action, in so 
far as it is still going on in the organization of living forms, 
are much simplified when they are taken in this way. 
Before the complexity of an organism and the practically 
infinite multitude of interwoven analyses and syntheses 
it presupposes, our understanding recoils disconcerted. 
That the simple play of physical and chemical forces, 
left to themselves, should have worked this marvel, we 
find hard to believe. And if it is a profound science 
which is at work, how are we to understand the influence 
exercised on this matter without form by this form without 
matter? But the difficulty arises from this, that we 
represent statically ready-made material particles juxta- 
posed to one another, and, also statically, an external 
cause which plasters upon them a skilfully contrived 
organization. In reality, life is a movement, materiality 
is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements 
is simple, the matter which forms a world being an un- 
divided flux, and undivided also the life that runs through 
it, cutting out in it living beings all along its track. Of 



250 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

these two currents the second runs counter to the first, 
but the first obtains, all the same, something from the 
second. There results between them a modus vivendi, 
which is organization. This organization takes, for our 
senses and for our intellect, the form of parts entirely 
external to other parts in space and in time. Not only 
do we shut our eyes to the unity of the impulse which, 
passing through generations, links individuals with in- 
dividuals, species with species, and makes of the whole 
series of the living one single immense wave flowing over 
matter, but each individual itself seems to us as an aggre- 
gate, aggregate of molecules and aggregate of facts. The 
reason of this lies in the structure of our intellect, which 
is formed to act on matter from without, and which suc- 
ceeds by making, in the flux of the real, instantaneous 
cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity, endlessly de- 
composable. Perceiving, in an organism, only parts 
external to parts, the understanding has the choice 
between two systems of explanation only: either to 
regard the infinitely complex (and thereby infinitely 
well-contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatena- 
tion of atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible 
influence of an external force that has grouped its ele- 
ments together. But this complexity is the work of 
the understanding; this incomprehensibility is also its 
work. Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of 
the intellect alone, which grasps only the already made 
and which looks from the outside, but with the spirit, 
I mean with that faculty of seeing which is immanent 
in the faculty of acting and which springs up, somehow, 
by the twisting of the will on itself, when action is turned 
into knowledge, like heat, so to say, into light. To 
movement, then, everything will be restored, and into 
movement everything will be resolved. Where the un- 



in.] IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 251 

derstanding, working on the image supposed to be fixed 
of the progressing action, shows us parts infinitely mani- 
fold and an order infinitely well contrived, we catch a 
glimpse of a simple process, an action which is making 
itself across an action of the same kind which is unmaking 
itself, like the fiery path torn by the last rocket of a fire- 
works display through the black cinders of the spent 
rockets that are falling dead. 

From this point of view, the general considerations 
we have presented concerning the evolution of life will 
be cleared up and completed. We will distinguish more 
sharply what is accidental from what is essential in this 
evolution. 

The impetus of life, of which we are speaking, consists 
in a need of creation. It cannot create absolutely, be- 
cause it is confronted with matter, that is to say with the 
movement that is the inverse of its own. But it seizes 
upon this matter, which is necessity itself, and strives 
to introduce into it the largest possible amount of indeter- 
mination and liberty. How does it go to work? 

An animal high in the scale may be represented in 
a general way, we said, as a sensori-motor nervous system 
imposed on digestive, respiratory, circulatory systems, 
etc. The function of these latter is to cleanse, repair 
and protect the nervous system, to make it as independent 
as possible of external circumstances, but, above all, to 
furnish it with energy to be expended in movements. 
The increasing complexity of the organism is therefore 
due theoretically (in spite of innumerable exceptions 
due to accidents of evolution) to the necessity of complexity 
in the nervous system. No doubt, each complication 
of any part of the organism involves many others in ad- 
dition, because this part itself must live, and every change 



252 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

in one point of the body reverberates, as it were, through- 
out. The complication may therefore go on to infinity 
in all directions; but it is the complication of the nervous 
system which conditions the others in right, if not always 
in fact. Now, in what does the progress of the nervous 
system itself consist? In a simultaneous development 
of automatic activity and of voluntary activity, the first 
furnishing the second with an appropriate instrument. 
Thus, in an organism such as ours, a considerable number 
of motor mechanisms are set up in the medulla and in the 
spinal cord, awaiting only a signal to release the correspond- 
ing act: the will is employed, in some cases, in setting up 
the mechanism itself, and in the others in choosing the 
mechanisms to be released, the manner of combining them 
and the moment of releasing them. The will of an animal 
is the more effective and the more intense, the greater 
the number of the mechanisms it can choose from, the 
more complicated the switchboard on which all the motor 
paths cross, or, in other words, the more developed its 
brain. Thus, the progress of the nervous system assures 
to the act increasing precision, increasing variety, in- 
creasing efficiency and independence. The organism be- 
haves more and more like a machine for action, which 
reconstructs itself entirely for every new act, as if it were 
made of india-rubber and could, at any moment, change 
the shape of all its parts. But, prior to the nervous 
system, prior even to the organism properly so called, 
already in the undifferentiated mass of the amoeba, 
this essential property of animal life is found. The amoeba 
deforms itself in varying directions; its entire mass does 
what the differentiation of parts will localize in a sensori- 
motor system in the developed animal. Doing it only 
in a rudimentary manner, it is dispensed from the com- 
plexity of the higher organisms; there is no need here of 



in.] THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 253 

the auxiliary elements that pass on to motor elements 
the energy to expend; the animal moves as a whole, and, 
as a whole also, procures energy by means of the organic 
substances it assimilates. Thus, whether low or high in 
the animal scale, we always find that animal life consists 
(1) in procuring a provision of energy; (2) in expending it, 
by means of a matter as supple as possible, in directions 
variable and unforeseen. 

Now, whence comes the energy? From the ingested 
food, for food is a kind of explosive, which needs only 
the spark to discharge the energy it stores. Who has 
made this explosive? The food may be the flesh of an 
animal nourished on animals and so on; but, in the end 
it is to the vegetable we always come back. Vegetables 
alone gather in the solar energy, and the animals do but 
borrow it from them, either directly or by some passing 
it on to others. How then has the plant stored up this 
energy? Chiefly by the chlorophyllian function, a chem- 
icism sui generis of which we do not possess the key, and 
which is probably unlike that of our laboratories. The 
process consists in using solar energy to fix the carbon 
of carbonic acid, and thereby to store this energy as we 
should store that of a water-carrier by employing him to 
fill an elevated reservoir: the water, once brought up, can 
set in motion a mill or a turbine, as we will and when we 
will. Each atom of carbon fixed represents something 
like the elevation of the weight of water, or like the stretch- 
ing of an elastic thread uniting the carbon to the oxygen 
in the carbonic acid. The elastic is relaxed, the weight 
falls back again, in short the energy held in reserve is 
restored, when, by a simple release, the carbon is per- 
mitted to rejoin its oxygen. 

So that all life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence 
like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it 



254 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the 
end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds 
of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through 
matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, 
no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforce- 
ment could come to it from without. But the impetus 
is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot 
overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is some- 
times turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; 
and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling 
of this conflict. The first great scission that had to be 
effected was that of the two kingdoms, vegetable and 
animal, which thus happen to be mutually complementary, 
without, however, any agreement having been made 
between them. It is not for the animal that the plant 
accumulates energy, it is for its own consumption; but 
its expenditure on itself is less discontinuous, and less 
concentrated, and therefore less efficacious, than was 
required by the initial impetus of life, essentially directed 
toward free actions: the same organism could not with 
equal force sustain the two functions at once, of gradual 
storage and sudden use. Of themselves, therefore, and 
without any external intervention, simply by the effect 
of the duality of the tendency involved in the original 
impetus and of the resistance opposed by matter to this 
impetus, the organisms leaned some in the first direction, 
others in the second. To this scission there succeeded 
many others. Hence the diverging lines of evolution, 
at least what is essential in them. But we must take into 
account retrogressions, arrests, accidents of every kind. 
And we must remember, above all, that each species 
behaves as if the general movement of life stopped at it 
instead of passing through it. It thinks only of itself, 
it lives only for itself. Hence the numberless struggles 



in.] THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 255 

that we behold in nature. Hence a discord, striking 
and terrible, but for which the original principle of life 
must not be held responsible. 

The part played by contingency in evolution is there- 
fore great. Contingent, generally, are the forms adopted, 
or rather invented. Contingent, relative to the obstacles 
encountered in a given place and at a given moment, 
is the dissociation of the primordial tendency into such and 
such complementary tendencies which create divergent 
lines of evolution. Contingent the arrests and set-backs; 
contingent, in large measure, the adaptations. Two 
things only are necessary: (1) a gradual accumulation 
of energy; (2) an elastic canalization of this energy in 
variable and indeterminable directions, at the end of which 
are free acts. 

This twofold result has been obtained in a particular 
way on our planet. But it might have been obtained 
by entirely different means. It was not necessary that 
life should fix its choice mainly upon the carbon of car- 
bonic acid. What was essential for it was to store solar 
energy; but, instead of asking the sun to separate, for 
instance, atoms of oxygen and carbon, it might (theoret- 
ically at least, and, apart from practical difficulties possibly 
insurmountable) have put forth other chemical elements, 
which would then have had to be associated or dissociated 
by entirely different physical means. And if the element 
characteristic of the substances that supply energy to the 
organism had been other than carbon, the element char- 
acteristic of the plastic substances would probably have 
been other than nitrogen, and the chemistry of living bodies 
would then have been radically different from what it is. 
The result would have been living forms without any 
analogy to those we know, whose anatomy would have 
been different, whose physiology also would have been 



256 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

different. Alone, the sensori-motor function would have 
been preserved, if not in its mechanism, at least in its 
effects. It is therefore probable that life goes on in other 
planets, in other solar systems also, under forms of which 
we have no idea, in physical conditions to which it seems to 
us, from the point of view of our physiology, to be ab- 
solutely opposed. If its essential aim is to catch up 
usable energy in order to expend it in explosive actions, 
it probably chooses, in each solar system and on each 
planet, as it does on the earth, the fittest means to get 
this result in the circumstances with which it is con- 
fronted. That is at least what reasoning by analogy leads 
to, and we use analogy the wrong way when we declare 
life to be impossible wherever the circumstances with 
which it is confronted are other than those on the earth. 
The truth is that life is possible wherever energy descends 
the incline indicated by Carnot's law and where a cause 
of inverse direction can retard the descent — that is to say, 
probably, in all the worlds suspended from all the stars. 
We go further: it is not even necessary that life should be 
concentrated and determined in organisms properly so 
called, that is, in definite bodies presenting to the flow of 
energy ready-made though elastic canals. It can be con- 
ceived (although it can hardly be imagined) that energy 
might be saved up, and then expended on varying lines 
running across a matter not yet solidified. Every es- 
sential of life would still be there, since there would still 
be slow accumulation of energy and sudden release. There 
would hardly be more difference between this vitality, 
vague and formless, and the definite vitality we know, 
than there is, in our psychical life, between the state of 
dream and the state of waking. Such may have been the 
condition of life in our nebula before the condensation of 
matter was complete, if it be true that life springs forward 



hi.! THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 257 

at the very moment when, as the effect of an inverse move- 
ment, the nebular matter appears. 

It is therefore conceivable that life might have assumed 
a totally different outward appearance and designed forms 
very different from those we know. With another chemical 
substratum, in other physical conditions, the impulsion 
would have remained the same, but it would have split 
up very differently in course of progress; and the whole 
would have traveled another road — whether shorter or 
longer who can tell? In any case, in the entire series of 
living beings no term would have been what it now is. 
Now, was it necessary that there should be a series, or 
terms? Why should not the unique impetus have been 
impressed on a unique body, which might have gone on 
evolving? 

This question arises, no doubt, from the comparison 
of life to an impetus. And it must be compared to an 
impetus, because no image borrowed from the physical 
world can give more nearly the idea of it. But it is only 
an image. In reality, life is of the psychological order, 
and it is of the essence of the psychical to enfold a 
confused plurality of interpenetrating terms. In space, 
and in space only, is distinct multiplicity possible : a point 
is absolutely external to another point. But pure and 
empty unity, also, is met with only in space; it is that 
of a mathematical point. Abstract unity and abstract 
multiplicity are determinations of space or categories of 
the understanding, whichever we will, spatiality and in- 
tellectuality being molded on each other. But what is of 
psychical nature cannot entirely correspond with space, 
nor enter perfectly into the categories of the understanding. 
Is my own person, at a given moment, one or manifold? 
If I declare it one, inner voices arise and protest — those 
of the sensations, feelings, ideas, among which my in- 



258 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

dividuality is distributed. But, if I make it distinctly 
manifold, my consciousness rebels quite as strongly; it 
affirms that my sensations, my feelings, my thoughts 
are abstractions which I effect on myself, and that each 
of my states implies all the others. I am then (we must 
adopt the language of the understanding, since only 
the understanding has a language) a unity that is multiple 
and a multiplicity that is one; 1 but unity and multiplicity 
are only views of my personality taken by an understand- 
ing that directs its categories at me; I enter neither into 
one nor into the other nor into both at once, although 
both, united, may give a fair imitation of the mutual 
interpenetration and continuity that I find at the base of 
my own self. Such is my inner life, and such also is life 
in general. While, in its contact with matter, life is 
comparable to an impulsion or an impetus, regarded in 
itself it is an immensity of potentiality, a mutual encroach- 
ment of thousands and thousands of tendencies which 
nevertheless are "thousands and thousands" only when 
once regarded as outside of each other, that is, when 
spatialized. Contact with matter is what determines 
this dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but 
potentially manifold; and, in this sense, individuation 
is in part the work of matter, in part the result of life's 
own inclination. Thus, a poetic sentiment, which bursts 
into distinct verses, lines and words, may be said to have 
already contained this multiplicity of individuated ele- 
ments, and yet, in fact, it is the materiality of language 
that creates it. 

But through the words, lines and verses runs the simple 
inspiration which is the whole poem. So, among the 

•We have dwelt on this point in an article entitled "Introduction 
a la m6taphysique" (Revue de metaphysique et de morale, January, 1903, 
pp. 1-26). 



ni.i THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 259 

dissociated individuals, one life goes on moving: every- 
where the tendency to individualize is opposed and at 
the same time completed by an antagonistic and com- 
plementary tendency to associate, as if the manifold 
unity of life, drawn in the direction of multiplicity, made 
so much the more effort to withdraw itself on to itself. 
A part is no sooner detached than it tends to reunite 
itself, if not to all the rest, at least to what is nearest 
to it. Hence, throughout the whole realm of life, a balanc- 
ing between individuation and association. Individuals 
join together into a society; but the society, as soon as 
formed, tends to melt the associated individuals into a new 
organism, so as to become itself an individual, able in 
its turD to be part and parcel of a new association. At the 
lowest degree of the scale of organisms we already find 
veritable associations, microbial colonies, and in these 
associations, according to a recent work, a tendency to 
individuate by the constitution of a nucleus. 1 The same 
tendency is met with again at a higher stage, in the proto- 
phytes, which, once having quitted the parent cell by way of 
division, remain united to each other by the gelatinous 
substance that surrounds them — also in those protozoa 
which begin by mingling their pseudopodia and end by 
welding themselves together. The "colonial" theory 
of the genesis of higher organisms is well known. The 
protozoa, consisting of one single cell, are supposed to 
have formed, by assemblage, aggregates which, relating 
themselves together in their turn, have given rise to 
aggregates of aggregates; so organisms more and more 
complicated, and also more and more differentiated, 
are born of the association of organisms barely differ- 
entiated and elementary. 2 In this extreme form, the 

1 Cf. a paper written (in Russian) by Serkovski, and reviewed in the 
Annie biologique, 1898, p. 317. 

» Ed. Perrier, Les Colonies animates, Paris, 1897 (2nd edition). 



260 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

theory is open to grave objections: more and more the 
idea seems to be gaining ground, that polyzoism is an 
exceptional and abnormal fact. 1 But it is none the less 
true that things happen as if every higher organism was 
born of an association of cells that have subdivided the 
work between them. Very probably it is not the cells 
that have made the individual by means of association; 
it is rather the individual that has made the cells by means 
of dissociation. 2 But this itself reveals to us, in the genesis 
of the individual, a haunting of the social form, as if the 
individual could develop only on the condition that its sub- 
stance should be split up into elements having themselves 
an appearance of individuality and united among them- 
selves by an appearance of sociality. There are numerous 
cases in which nature seems to hesitate between the two 
forms, and to ask herself if she shall make a society or an 
individual. The slightest push is enough, then, to make 
the balance weigh on one side or the other. If we take 
an infusorian sufficiently large, such as the Stentor, and 
cut it into two halves each containing a part of the nu- 
cleus, each of the two halves will generate an independent 
Stentor; but if we divide it incompletely, so that a pro- 
toplasmic communication is left between the two halves, 
we shall see them execute, each from its side, correspond- 
ing movements: so that in this case it is enough that a 
thread should be maintained or cut in order that life 
should affect the social or the individual form. Thus, 
in rudimentary organisms consisting of a single cell, we 
already find that the apparent individuality of the whole 

1 Delage, L'HSridite, 2nd edition, Paris, 1903, p. 97. Cf. by the same 
author, "La Conception polyzoiique des etres" (Revue scientifique, 1896, 
pp. 641-653). 

2 This is the theory maintained by Kunstler, Delage, Sedgwick, Labbe, 
etc. Its development, with bibliographical references, will be found in 
the work of Busquet, Les etres vivants, Paris, 1899. 



nil THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 261 

is the composition of an undefined number of potential 
individualities potentially associated. But, from top to 
bottom of the series of living beings, the same law is mani- 
fested. And it is this that we express when we say that 
unity and multiplicity are categories of inert matter, 
that the vital impetus is neither pure unity nor pure 
multiplicity, and that if the matter to which it communi- 
cates itself compels it to choose one of the two, its choice 
will never be definitive: it will leap from one to the other 
indefinitely. The evolution of life in the double direction 
of individuality and association has therefore nothing 
accidental about it : it is due to the very nature of life. 

Essential also is the progress to reflextion. If our analysis 
is correct, it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness, 
that is at the origin of life. Consciousness, or supra- 
consciousness, is the name for the rocket whose extin- 
guished fragments fall back as matter; consciousness, 
again, is the name for that which subsists of the rocket 
itself, passing through the fragments and lighting them 
up into organisms. But this consciousness, which is a 
need of creation, is made manifest to itself only where 
creation is possible. It lies dormant when life is con- 
demned to automatism; it wakens as soon as the possi- 
bility of a choice is restored. That is why, in organisms 
unprovided with a nervous system, it varies according 
to the power of locomotion and of deformation of which 
the organism disposes. And in animals with a nervous 
system, it is proportional to the complexity of the switch- 
board on which the paths called sensory and the paths 
called motor intersect — that is, of the brain. How must 
this solidarity between the organism and consciousness 
be understood? 

We will not dwell here on a point that we have dealt 
with in former works. Let us merely recall that a theory 



262 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

such as that according to whieh consciousness is attached 
to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work like 
a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the 
detail of analysis; it-is a convenient mode of expression. 
But it is nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre 
of action. It represents a certain sum of contingency 
entering into the world, that is to say, a certain quantity 
of possible action — a quantity variable with individuals 
and especially with species. The nervous system of 
an animal marks out the flexible lines on which its action 
will run (although the potential energy is accumulated 
in the muscles rather than in the nervous system itself); 
its nervous centres indicate, by their development and their 
configuration, the more or less extended choice it will 
have among more or less numerous and complicated 
actions. Now, since the awakening of consciousness in a 
living creature is the more complete, the greater the 
latitude of choice allowed to it and the larger the amount 
of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that the development 
of consciousness will appear to be dependent on that of 
the nervous centres. On the other hand, every state of 
consciousness being, in one aspect of it, a question put 
to the motor activity and even the beginning of a reply, 
there is no psychical event that does not imply the entry 
into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything seems, 
therefore, to happen as if consciousness sprang from the 
brain, and as if the detail of conscious activity were mod- 
eled on that of the cerebral activity. In reality, conscious- 
ness does not spring from the brain; but brain and con- 
sciousness correspond because equally they measure, the 
one by the complexity of its structure and the other by 
the intensity of its awareness, the quantity of choice that 
the living being has at its disposal. 

It is precisely because a cerebral state expresses simply 



in.] THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 263 

what there is of nascent action in the corresponding 
psychical state, that the psychical state tells us more 
than the cerebral state. The consciousness of a living 
being, as we have tried to prove elsewhere, is inseparable 
from its brain in the sense in which a sharp knife is in- 
separable from its edge: the brain is the sharp edge by 
which consciousness cuts into the compact tissue of events, 
but the brain is no more coextensive with consciousness 
than the edge is with the knife. Thus, from the fact that 
two brains, like that of the ape and that of the man, are 
very much alike, we cannot conclude that the correspond- 
ing consciousnesses are comparable or commensurable. 

But the two brains may perhaps be less alike than 
we suppose. How can we help being struck by the fact 
that, while man is capable of learning any sort of exer- 
cise, of constructing any sort of object, in short of ac- 
quiring any kind of motor habit whatsoever, the faculty 
of combining new movements is strictly limited in the 
best-endowed animal, even in the ape? The cerebral 
characteristic of man is there. The human brain is 
made, like every brain, to set up motor mechanisms 
and to enable us to choose among them, at any instant, 
the one we shall put in motion by the pull of a trigger. 
But it differs from other brains in this, that the number 
of mechanisms it can set up, and consequently the choice 
that it gives as to which among them shall be released, 
is unlimited. Now, from the limited to the unlimited 
there is all the distance between the closed and the open. 
It is not a difference of degree, but of kind. 

Radical therefore, also, is the difference between ani- 
mal consciousness, even the most intelligent, and human 
consciousness. For consciousness corresponds exactly to 
the living being's power of choice; it is co-extensive with 
the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real action; 



264 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

consciousness is synonymous with invention and with 
freedom. Now, in the animal, invention is never any- 
thing but a variation on the theme of routine. Shut up 
in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no doubt, in en- 
larging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes 
automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create 
a new automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon 
as they are opened; by pulling at its chain it succeeds only 
in stretching it. With man, consciousness breaks the 
chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself free. The 
whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of 
consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less com- 
plete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which 
has fallen back on it. The enterprise was paradoxical, 
if, indeed, we may speak here otherwise than by metaphor 
of enterprise and of effort. It was to create with matter, 
which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to 
make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, 
and to use the determinism of nature to pass through 
the meshes of the net which this very determinism had 
spread. But, everywhere except in man, consciousness 
has let itself be caught in the net whose meshes it tried 
to pass through: it has remained the captive of the 
mechanisms it has set up. Automatism, which it tries 
to draw in the direction of freedom, winds about it and 
drags it down. It has not the pow.er to escape, because 
the energy it has provided for acts is almost all employed 
in maintaining the infinitely subtle and essentially unstable 
equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man 
not only maintains his machine, he succeeds in using it as 
he pleases. Doubtless he owes this to the superiority of 
his brain, which enables him to build an unlimited number 
of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to the old 
ones unceasingly, and, by dividing automatism against 



in.] THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 265 

itself, to rule it. He owes it to his language, which 
furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which 
to incarnate itself and thus exempts it from dwelling 
exclusively on material bodies, whose flux would soon 
drag it along and finally swallow it up. He owes it to 
social life, which stores and preserves efforts as language 
stores thought, fixes thereby a mean level to which in- 
dividuals must raise themselves at the outset, and by this 
initial stimulation prevents the average man from slum- 
bering and drives the superior man to mount still higher. 
But our brain, our society, and our language are only the 
external and various signs of one and the same internal 
superiority. They tell, each after its manner, the unique, 
exceptional success which life has won at a given moment 
of its evolution. They express the difference of kind, 
and not only of degree, which separates man from the rest 
of the animal world. They let us guess that, while at the 
end of the vast spring-board from which life has taken its 
leap, all the others have stepped down, finding the cord 
stretched too high, man alone has cleared the obstacle. 

It is in this quite special sense that man is the "term" 
and the " end" of evolution. Life, we have said, transcends 
finality as it transcends the other categories. It is es- 
sentially a current sent through matter, drawing from it 
what it can. There has not, therefore, properly speaking, 
been any project or plan. On the other hand, it is abun- 
dantly evident that the rest of nature is not for the sake of 
man: we struggle like the other species, we have struggled 
against other species. Moreover, if the evolution of life 
had encountered other accidents in its course, if, thereby, 
the current of life had been otherwise divided, we should 
have been, physically and morally, far different from what 
we are. For these various reasons it would be wrong to 
regard humanity, such as we have it before our eyes, as 



266 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

pre-figured in the evolutionary movement. It cannot 
even be said to be the outcome of the whole of evolution, 
for evolution has been accomplished on several divergent 
lines, and while the human species is at the end of one of 
them, other lines have been followed with other species 
at their end. It is in a quite different sense that we hold 
humanity to be the ground of evolution. 

From our point of view, life appears in its entirety 
as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads 
outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circum- 
ference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one 
single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion 
has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human 
form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness 
has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on 
its way. Man, then, continues the vital movement in- 
definitely, although he does not draw along with him all 
that life carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there 
have traveled other tendencies which life implied, and of 
which, since everything interpenetrates, man has, doubt- 
less, kept something, but of which he has kept only very 
little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may 
call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize 
himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of 
himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest 
of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, 
at least in what these have that is positive and above the 
accidents of evolution. 

From this point of view, the discordances of which 
nature offers us the spectacle are singularly weakened. 
The organized world as a whole becomes as the soil on 
which was to grow either man himself or a being who 
morally must resemble him. The animals, however 
distant they may be from our species, however hostile 



mi THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 267 

to it, have none the less been useful traveling companions, 
on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever encum- 
brances it was dragging along, and who have enabled it to 
rise, in man, to heights from which it sees an unlimited 
horizon open again before it. 

It is true that it has not only abandoned cumbersome 
baggage on the way; it has also had to give up valuable 
goods. Consciousness, in man, is pre-eminently intellect. 
It might have been, it ought, so it seems, to have been 
also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two 
opposite directions of the work of consciousness : intuition 
goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the in- 
verse direction, and thus finds itself naturally in accordance 
with the movement of matter. A complete and perfect 
humanity would be that in which these two forms of con- 
scious activity should attain their full development. And, 
between this humanity and ours, we may conceive any 
number of possible stages, corresponding to all the degrees 
imaginable of intelligence and of intuition. In this 
lies the part of contingency in the mental structure of 
our species. A different evolution might have led to 
a humanity either more intellectual still or more intuitive. 
In the humanity of which we are a part, intuition is, in 
fact, almost completely sacrificed to intellect. It seems 
that to conquer matter, and to reconquer its own self, 
consciousness has had to exhaust the best part of its power. 
This conquest, in the particular conditions in which it has 
been accomplished, has required that consciousness should 
adapt itself to the habits of matter and concentrate all 
its attention on them, in fact determine itself more espe- 
cially as intellect. Intuition is there, however, but vague 
and above all discontinuous. It is a lamp almost ex- 
tinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few 
moments at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital 



268 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, 
on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our 
origin and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light 
feeble and vacillating, but which none the less pierces the 
darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us. 

These fleeting intuitions, which light up their object 
only at distant intervals, philosophy ought to seize, first 
to sustain them, then to expand them and so unite them 
together. The more it advances in this work, the more 
will it perceive that intuition is mind itself, and, in a certain 
sense, life itself: the intellect has been cut out of it by a 
process resembling that which has generated matter. 
Thus is revealed the unity of the spiritual life. We recog- 
nize it only when we place ourselves in intuition in order 
to go from intuition to the intellect, for from the intellect 
we shall never pass to intuition. 

Philosophy introduces us thus into the spiritual life. 
And it shows us at the same time the relation of the life 
of the spirit to that of the body. The great error of the 
doctrines on the spirit has been the idea that by isolating 
the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space 
as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it 
beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing 
it to be taken as an effect of mirage! Certainly they are 
right to listen to conscience when conscience affirms human 
freedom; but the intellect is there, which says that the 
cause determines its effect, that like conditions like, that 
all is repeated and that all is given. They are right to 
believe in the absolute reality of the person and in his 
independence toward matter; but science is there, which 
shows the interdependence of conscious life and cerebral 
activity. They are right to attribute to man a privileged 
place in nature, to hold that the distance is infinite be- 
tween the animal and man; but the history of life is there, 



in.] THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 269 

which makes us witness the genesis of species by gradual 
transformation, and seems thus to reintegrate man in ani- 
mality. When a strong instinct assures the probability 
of personal survival, they are right not to close their ears 
to its voice; but if there exist "souls" capable of an in- 
dependent life, whence do they come? When, how and 
why do they enter into this body which we see arise, 
quite naturally, from a mixed cell derived from the bodies 
of its two parents? All these questions will remain un- 
answered, a philosophy of intuition will be a negation 
of science, will be sooner or later swept away by science, 
if it does not resolve to see the life of the body just where 
it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit. 
But it will then no longer have to do with definite living 
beings. Life as a whole, from the initial impulsion that 
thrust it into the world, will appear as a wave which rises, 
and which is opposed by the descending movement of 
matter. On the greater part of its surface, at different 
heights, the current is converted by matter into a vortex. 
At one point alone it passes freely, dragging with it the 
obstacle which will weigh on its progress but will not stop 
it. At this point is humanity; it is our privileged situation. 
On the other hand, this rising wave is consciousness, 
and, like all consciousness, it includes potentialities with- 
out number which interpenetrate and to which con- 
sequently neither the category of unity nor that of multi- 
plicity is appropriate, made as they both are for inert 
matter. The matter that it bears along with it, and in 
the interstices of which it inserts itself, alone can divide 
it into distinct individualities. On flows the current, 
running through human generations, subdividing itself 
into individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated 
in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. 
Thus souls are continually being created, which, never- 



270 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

theless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing 
else than the little rills into which the great river of life 
divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. 
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, 
although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness 
is distinct from the organism it animates, although it 
must undergo its vicissitudes. As the possible actions 
which a state of consciousness indicates are at every 
instant beginning to be carried out in the nervous centres, 
the brain underlines at every instant the motor indications 
of the state of consciousness; but the interdepend ency of 
consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny 
of consciousness is not bound up on that account with the 
destiny of cerebral matter. Finally, consciousness is 
essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it cannot pass 
through matter without settling on it, without adapting 
itself to it : this adaptation is what we call intellectuality ; 
and the intellect, turning itself back toward active, that 
is to say free, consciousness, naturally makes it enter into 
the conceptual forms into which it is accustomed to see 
matter fit. It will therefore always perceive freedom 
in the form of necessity; it will always neglect the part 
of novelty or of creation inherent in the free act; it will 
always substitute for action itself an imitation artificial, 
approximative, obtained by compounding the old with the 
old and the same with the same. Thus, to the eyes of a 
philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in intuition, 
many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a 
doctrine does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us 
also more power to act and to live. For, with it, we feel 
ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no 
longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. 
As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire 
solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided move- 



in.] THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 271 

ment of descent which is materiality itself, so all organized 
beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first 
origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places 
as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the 
inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. 
All the living hold together, and all yield to the same 
tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the 
plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, 
in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside 
and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming 
charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the 
most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL MECHANISM OF THOUGHT AND 
THE MECHANISTIC ILLUSION — A GLANCE AT THE 
HISTORY OF SYSTEMS' — REAL BECOMING AND FALSE 
EVOLUTIONISM. 

It remains for us to examine in themselves two theoretical 
illusions which we have frequently met with before, but 
whose consequences rather than principle have hitherto 
concerned us. Such is the object of the present chapter. 
It will afford us the opportunity of removing certain 
objections, of clearing up certain misunderstandings, 
and, above all, of defining more precisely, by contrasting 
it with others, a philosophy which sees in duration the very 
stuff of reality. 

Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a per- 
petual becoming. It makes itself or it unmakes itself, 
but it is never something made. Such is the intuition 
that we have of mind when we draw aside the veil which is 
interposed between our consciousness and ourselves. 
This, also, is what our intellect and senses themselves 
would show us of matter, if they could obtain a direct 
and disinterested idea of it. But, preoccupied before 
everything with the necessities of action, the intellect, 

1 The part of this chapter which treats of the history of systems, par- 
ticularly of the Greek philosophy, is only the very succinct resume of 
views that we developed at length, from 1900 to 1904, in our lectures 
at the College de France, especially in a course on the History of the 
Idea of Time (1902-1903). We then compared the mechanism of con- 
ceptual thought to that of the cinematograph. We believe the com- 
parison will be useful here. 

272 



w.] THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 273 

like the senses, is limited to taking, at intervals, views 
that are instantaneous and by that very fact immobile 
of the becoming of matter. Consciousness, being in its 
turn formed on the intellect, sees clearly of the inner life 
what is already made, and only feels confusedly the making. 
Thus, we pluck out of duration those moments that interest 
us, and that we have gathered along its course. These 
alone we retain. And we are right in so doing, while 
action only is in question. But when, in speculating on 
the nature of the real, we go on regarding it as our practi- 
cal interest requires us to regard it, we become unable to 
perceive the true evolution, the radical becoming. Of 
becoming we perceive only states, of duration only in- 
stants, and even when we speak of duration and of becom- 
ing, it is of another thing that we are thinking. Such is 
the most striking of the two illusions we wish to examine. 
It consists in supposing that we can think the unstable 
by means of the stable, the moving by means of the im- 
mobile. 

The other illusion is near akin to the first. It has the 
same origin, being also due to the fact that we import 
into speculation a procedure made for practice. All 
action aims at getting something that we feel the want of, 
or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this 
very special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty 
to the full, from an absence to a presence, from the unreal 
to the real. Now the unreality which is here in question 
is purely relative to the direction in which our attention 
is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot 
pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the 
one we are seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought- 
for reality wherever we find the presence of another. We 
thus express what we have as a function of what we want. 
This is quite legitimate in the sphere of action. But, 



274 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

whether we will or no, we keep to this way of speaking, 
and also of thinking, when we speculate on the nature 
of things independently of the interest they have for 
us. Thus arises the second of the two illusions. We 
propose to examine this first. It is due, like the other, 
to the static habits that our intellect contracts when it 
prepares our action on things. Just as we pass through 
the immobile to go to the moving, so we make use of 
the void in order to think the full. 

We have met with this illusion already in dealing with 
the fundamental problem of knowledge. The question, 
we then said, is to know why there is order, and not dis- 
order, in things. But the question has meaning only if 
we suppose that disorder, understood as an absence of 
order, is possible, or imaginable, or conceivable. Now, 
it is only order that is real; but, as order can take two 
forms, and as the presence of the one may be said to consist 
in the absence of the other, we speak of disorder whenever 
we have before us that one of the two orders for which 
we are not looking. The idea of disorder is then entirely 
practical. It corresponds to the disappointment of a 
certain expectation, and it does not denote the absence 
of all order, but only the presence of that order which does 
not offer us actual interest. So that whenever we try to 
deny order completely, absolutely, we find that we are leap- 
ing from one kind of order to the other indefinitely, and 
that the supposed suppression of the one and the other 
implies the presence of the two. Indeed, if we go on, 
and persist in shutting our eyes to this movement of the 
mind and all it involves, we are no longer dealing with an 
idea; all that is left of disorder is a word. Thus the 
problem of knowledge is complicated, and possibly made 
insoluble, by the idea that order fills a void and that its 
actual presence is superposed on its virtual absence. We 



iv.i THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 275 

go from absence to presence, from the void to the full, in 
virtue of the fundamental illusion of our understanding. 
That is the error of which we noticed one consequence in 
our last chapter. As we then anticipated, we must come 
to close quarters with this error, and finally grapple with 
it. We must face it in itself, in the radically false con- 
ception which it implies of negation, of the void and of the 
nought. 1 

Philosophers have paid little attention to the idea 
of the nought. And yet it is often the hidden spring, 
the invisible mover of philosophical thinking. From 
the first awakening of reflection, it is this that pushes 
to the fore, right under the eyes of consciousness, the 
torturing problems, the questions that we cannot gaze 
at without feeling giddy and bewildered. I have no 
sooner commenced to philosophize than I ask myself 
why I exist; and when I take account of the intimate 
connection in which I stand to the rest of the universe, 
the difficulty is only pushed back, for I want to know 
why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe to a 
Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or 
creates it, my thought rests on this principle only a few 
moments, for the same problem recurs, this time in its 
full breadth and generality: Whence comes it, and how 
can it be understood, that anything exists? Even here, in 
the present work, when matter has been defined as a kind 
of descent, this descent as the interruption of a rise, this 
rise itself as a growth, when finally a Principle of creation 
has been put at the base of things, the same question 
springs up: How — why does this principle exist rather 
than nothing? 

Now, if I push these questions aside and go straight 

1 The analysis of the idea of the nought which we give here (pp. 275- 
298) has appeared before in the Revue philosophique (November 1906). 



276 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to what hides behind them, this is what I find: — Exist- 
ence appears to me like a conquest over nought. I say 
to myself that there might be, that indeed there ought to 
be, nothing, and I then wonder that there is something. 
Or I represent all reality extended on nothing as on a 
carpet : at first was nothing, and being has come by super- 
addition to it. Or, yet again, if something has always 
existed, nothing must always have served as its substratum 
or receptacle, and is therefore eternally prior. A glass 
may have always been full, but the liquid it contains never- 
theless fills a void. In the same way, being may have 
always been there, but the nought which is filled, and, as 
it were, stopped up by it, pre-exists for it none the less, if 
not in fact at least in right. In short, I cannot get rid of 
the idea that the full is an embroidery on the canvas 
of the void, that being is superimposed on nothing, and 
that in the idea of "nothing" there is less than in that of 
"something." Hence all the mystery. 

It is necessary that this mystery should be cleared up. 
It is more especially necessary, if we put duration and 
free choice at the base of things. For the disdain of 
metaphysics for all reality that endures comes precisely 
from this, that it reaches being only by passing through 
"not-being," and that an existence which endures seems 
to it not strong enough to conquer non-existence and itself 
posit itself. It is for this reason especially that it is in- 
clined to endow true being with a logical, and not a psy- 
chological nor a physical existence. For the nature of a 
purely logical existence is such that it seems to be self- 
sufficient and to posit itself by the effect alone of the force 
immanent in truth. If I ask myself why bodies or minds 
exist rather than nothing, I find no answer; but that a 
logical principle, such as A = A, should have the power 
of creating itself, triumphing over the nought through- 



iv.i THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 277 

out eternity, seems to me natural. A circle drawn with 
chalk on a blackboard is a thing which needs explanation : 
this entirely physical existence has not by itself where- 
with to vanquish non-existence. But the " logical essence" 
of the circle, that is to say, the possibility of drawing it 
according to a certain law — in short, its definition — is a 
thing which appears to me eternal: it has neither place 
nor date; for nowhere, at no moment, has the drawing 
of a circle begun to be possible. Suppose, then, that the 
principle on which all things rest, and which all things 
manifest possesses an existence of the same nature as that 
of the definition of the circle, or as that of the axiom 
A = A: the mystery of existence vanishes, for the being 
that is at the base of everything posits itself then in eternity, 
as logic itself does. True, it will cost us rather a heavy 
sacrifice: if the principle of all things exists after the 
manner of a logical axiom or of a mathematical defini- 
tion, the things themselves must go forth from this principle 
like the applications of an axiom or the consequences of a 
definition, and there will no longer be place, either in the 
things nor in their principle, for efficient causality under- 
stood in the sense of a free choice. Such are precisely 
the conclusions of a doctrine like that of Spinoza, or even 
that of Leibniz, and such indeed has been their genesis. 

Now, if we could prove that the idea of the nought, 
in the sense in which we take it when we oppose it to 
that of existence, is a pseudo-idea, the problems that are 
raised around it would become pseudo-problems. The 
hypothesis of an absolute that acts freely, that in an 
eminent sense endures, would no longer raise up intel- 
lectual prejudices. The road would be cleared for a 
philosophy more nearly approaching intuition, and which 
would no longer ask the same sacrifices of common 
sense. 



278 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

Let us then see what we are thinking about when we 
speak of "Nothing." To represent "Nothing/' we must 
either imagine it or conceive it. Let us examine what 
this image or this idea may be. First, the image. 

I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish 
one by one the sensations that come to me from the outer 
world. Now it is done; all my perceptions vanish, the 
material universe sinks into silence and the night. — I 
subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I 
am still there, with the organic sensations which come to 
me from the surface and from the interior of my body, 
with the recollections which my past perceptions have 
left behind them — nay, with the impression, most positive 
and full, of the void I have just made about me. How can 
I suppress all this? How eliminate myself? I can even, 
it may be, blot out and forget my recollections up to my 
immediate past; but at least I keep the consciousness 
of my present reduced to its extremest poverty, that is to 
say, of the actual state of my body. I will try, however, 
to do away even with this consciousness itself. I will 
reduce more and more the sensations my body sends in to 
me: now they are almost gone; now they are gone, they 
have disappeared in the night where all things else have 
already died away. But no! At the very instant that 
my consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness 
lights up — or rather, it was already alight: it had arisen 
the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the 
first; for the first could disappear only for another and 
in the presence of another. I see myself annihilated only 
if I have already resuscitated myself by an act which is 
positive, however involuntary and unconscious. So, do 
what I will, I am always perceiving something, either from 
without or from within. When I no longer know anything 
of external objects, it is because I have taken refuge in 



nr. j THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 279 

the consciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish this 
inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an 
imaginary self which now perceives as an external object 
the self that is dying away. Be it external or internal, 
some object there always is that my imagination is repre- 
senting. My imagination, it is true, can go from one to 
the other, I can by turns imagine a nought of external 
perception or a nought of internal perception, but not both 
at once, for the absence of one consists, at bottom, in the 
exclusive presence of the other. But, from the fact that 
two relative noughts are imaginable in turn, we wrongly 
conclude that they are imaginable together: a conclusion 
the absurdity of which must be obvious, for we cannot 
imagine a nought without perceiving, at least confusedly, 
that we are imagining it, consequently that we are acting, 
that we are thinking, and therefore that something still 
subsists. 

The image, then, properly so called, of a suppression 
of everything is never formed by thought. The effort 
by which we strive to create this image simply ends in 
making us swing to and fro between the vision of an outer 
and that of an inner reality. In this coming and going 
of our mind between the without and the within, there is 
a point, at equal distance from both, in which it seems to 
us that we no longer perceive the one, and that we do not 
yet perceive the other: it is there that the image of 
"Nothing" is formed. In reality, we then perceive both, 
having reached the point where the two terms come to- 
gether, and the image of Nothing, so defined, is an image 
full of things, an image that includes at once that of the 
subject and that of the object and, besides, a perpetual 
leaping from one to the other and the refusal ever to come 
to rest finally on either. Evidently this is not the nothing 
that we can oppose to being, and put before or be- 



280 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

neath being, for it already includes existence in general. 

But we shall be told that, if the representation of Noth- 
ing, visible or latent, enters into the reasonings of philoso- 
phers, it is not as an image, but as an idea. It may be 
agreed that we do not imagine the annihilation of every- 
thing, but it will be claimed that we can conceive it. We 
conceive a polygon with a thousand sides, said Descartes, 
although we do not see it in imagination: it is enough that 
we can clearly represent the possibility of constructing it. 
So with the idea of the annihilation of everything. Noth- 
ing simpler, it will be said, than the procedure by which 
we construct the idea of it. There is, in fact, not a single 
object of our experience that we cannot suppose annihilated. 
Extend this annihilation of a first object to a second, 
then to a third, and so on as long as you please: the nought 
is the limit toward which the operation tends. And the 
nought so defined is the annihilation of everything. That 
is the theory. We need only consider it in this form to see 
the absurdity it involves. 

An idea constructed by the mind is an idea only if 
its pieces are capable of coexisting; it is reduced to a 
mere word if the elements that we bring together to com- 
pose it are driven away as fast as we assemble them. 
When I have defined the circle, I easily represent a black 
or a white circle, a circle in cardboard, iron, or brass, a 
transparent or an opaque circle — but not a square circle, 
because the law of the generation of the circle excludes 
the possibility of defining this figure with straight lines. 
So my mind can represent any existing thing whatever 
as annihilated; — but if the annihilation of anything by 
the mind is an operation whose mechanism implies that it 
works on a part of the whole, and not on the whole itself, 
then the extension of such an operation to the totality 
of things becomes self-contradictory and absurd, and the 



iv.] ,THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 281 

idea of an annihilation of everything presents the same 
character as that of a square circle: it is not an idea, it 
is only a word. So let us examine more closely the 
mechanism of the operation. 

In fact, the object suppressed is either external or 
internal: it is a thing or it is a state of consciousness. 
Let us consider the first case. I annihilate in thought 
an external object: in the place where it was, there is 
no longer anything. — No longer anything of that object, 
of course, but another object has taken its place: there is 
no absolute void in nature. But admit that an absolute 
void is possible : it is not of that void that I am thinking 
when I say that the object, once annihilated, leaves its 
place unoccupied; for by the hypothesis it is a place, that 
is a void limited by precise outlines, or, in other words, a 
kind of thing. The void of which I speak, therefore, is, at 
bottom, only the absence of some definite object, which 
was here at first, is now elsewhere and, in so far as it is no 
longer in its former place, leaves behind it, so to speak, the 
void of itself. A being unendowed with memory or 
prevision would not use the words "void" or "nought;" 
he would express only what is and what is perceived; 
now, what is, and what is perceived, is the presence of 
one thing or of another, never the absence of anything. 
There is absence only for a being capable of remem- 
bering and expecting. He remembered an object, and 
perhaps expected to encounter it again; he finds another, 
and he expresses the disappointment of his expectation 
(an expectation sprung from recollection) by saying that 
he no longer finds anything, that he encounters "nothing." 
Even if he did not expect to encounter the object, it is a 
possible expectation of it, it is still the falsification of his 
eventual expectation that he expresses by saying that the 
object is no longer where it was. What he perceives in 



282 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

reality, what he will succeed in effectively thinking of, 
is the presence of the old object in a new place or that of a 
new object in the old place; the rest, all that is expressed 
negatively by such words as "nought" or the "void," is 
not so much thought as feeling, or, to speak more exactly, 
it is the tinge that feeling gives to thought. The idea 
of annihilation or of partial nothingness is therefore 
formed here in the course of the substitution of one 
thing for another, whenever this substitution is thought 
by a mind that would prefer to keep the old thing in 
the place of the new, or at least conceives this prefer- 
ence as possible. The idea implies on the subjective 
side a preference, on the objective side a substitution, 
and is nothing else but a combination of, or rather an 
interference between, this feeling of preference and this 
idea of substitution. 

Such is the mechanism of the operation by which our 
mind annihilates an object and succeeds in represent- 
ing in the external world a partial nought. Let us now 
see how it represents it within itself. We find in our- 
selves phenomena that are produced, and not phenomena 
that are not produced. I experience a sensation or an 
emotion, I conceive an idea, I form a resolution: my 
consciousness perceives these facts, which are so many 
presences, and there is no moment in which facts of this 
kind are not present to me. I can, no doubt, interrupt 
by thought the course of my inner life; I may suppose 
that I sleep without dreaming or that I have ceased to 
exist; but at the very instant when I make this supposi- 
tion, I conceive myself, I imagine myself watching over my 
slumber or surviving my annihilation, and I give up per- 
ceiving myself from within only by taking refuge in the 
perception of myself from without. That is to say that 
here again the full always succeeds the full, and that an 



iv.j THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 283 

intelligence that was only intelligence, that had neither 
regret nor desire, whose movement was governed by 
the movement of its object, could not even conceive an 
absence or a void. The conception of a void arises 
here when consciousness, lagging behind itself, remains 
attached to the recollection of an old state when another 
state is already present. It is only a comparison be- 
tween what is and what could or ought to be, between 
the full and the full. In a word, whether it be a void of 
matter or a void of consciousness, the representation of 
the void is always a representation which is full and which 
resolves itself on analysis into two positive elements: the idea, 
distinct or confused, of a substitution, and the feeling, ex- 
perienced or imagined, of a desire or a regret. 

It follows from this double analysis that the idea of 
the absolute nought, in the sense of the annihilation of 
everything, is a self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a 
mere word. If suppressing a thing consists in replacing 
it by another, if thinking the absence of one thing is 
only possible by the more or less explicit representation 
of the presence of some other thing, if, in short, anni- 
hilation signifies before anything else substitution, the 
idea of an "annihilation of everything" is as absurd as 
that of a square circle. The absurdity is not obvious, 
because there exists no particular object that cannot be 
supposed annihilated; then, from the fact that there is 
nothing to prevent each thing in turn being suppressed in 
thought, we conclude that it is possible to suppose them sup- 
pressed altogether. We do not see that suppressing each 
thing in turn consists precisely in replacing it in proportion 
and degree by another, and therefore that the suppression 
of absolutely everything implies a downright contradic- 
tion in terms, since the operation consists in destroy- 
ing the very condition that makes the operation possible. 



284 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

But the illusion is tenacious. Though suppressing 
one thing consists in fact in substituting another for it, 
we do not conclude, we are unwilling to conclude, that 
the annihilation of a thing in thought implies the sub- 
stitution in thought of a new thing for the old. We 
agree that a thing is always replaced by another thing, 
and even that our mind cannot think the disappearance 
of an object, external or internal, without thinking — 
under an indeterminate and confused form, it is true — 
that another object is substituted for it. But we add 
that the representation of a disappearance is that of a 
phenomenon that is produced in space or at least in time, 
that consequently it still implies the calling up of an 
image, and that it is precisely here that we have to free 
ourselves from the imagination in order to appeal to 
the pure understanding. "Let us therefore no longer 
speak," it will be said, "of disappearance or annihilation; 
these are physical operations. Let us no longer repre- 
sent the object A as annihilated or absent. Let us say 
simply that we think it "non-existent." To annihilate 
it is to act on it in time and perhaps also in space; it 
is to accept, consequently, the condition of spatial and 
temporal existence, to accept the universal connection 
that binds an object to all others, and prevents it from 
disappearing without being at the same time replaced. 
But we can free ourselves from these conditions; all 
that is necessary is that by an effort of abstraction we 
should call up the idea of the object A by itself, that 
we should agree first to consider it as existing, and then, 
by a stroke of the intellectual pen, blot out the clause. 
The object will then be, by our decree, non-existent." 

Very well, let us strike out the clause. We must 
not suppose that our pen-stroke is self-sufficient — that 
it can be isolated from the rest of things. We shall see 



iv.] THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 285 

that it carries with it, whether we will or no, all that we 
tried to abstract from. Let us compare together the two 
ideas — the object A supposed to exist, and the same 
object supposed "non-existent." 

The idea of the object A, supposed existent, is the 
representation pure and simple of the object A, for we 
cannot represent an object without attributing to it, 
by the very fact of representing it, a certain reality. Be- 
tween thinking an object and thinking it existent, there 
is absolutely no difference. Kant has put this point 
in clear light in his criticism of the ontological argument. 
Then, what is it to think the object A non-existent? To 
represent it non-existent cannot consist in withdrawing 
from the idea of the object A the idea of the attribute 
"existence," since, I repeat, the representation of the 
existence of the object is inseparable from the representation 
of the object, and indeed is one with it. To represent the 
object A non-existent can only consist, therefore, in adding 
something to the idea- of this object: we add to it, in 
fact, the idea of an exclusion of this particular object by 
actual reality in general. To think the object A as non- 
existent is first to think the object and consequently to 
think it existent; it is then to think that another reality, 
with which it is incompatible, supplants it. Only, it is 
useless to represent this latter reality explicitly; we are 
not concerned with what it is; it is enough for us to know 
that it drives out the object A, which alone is of interest 
to us. That is why we think of the expulsion rather than 
of the cause which expels. But this cause is none the 
less present to the mind; it is there in the implicit state, 
that which expels being inseparable from the expulsion 
as the hand which drives the pen is inseparable from the 
pen-stroke. The act by which we declare an object 
unreal therefore posits the existence of the real in general. 



286 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

In other words, to represent an object as unreal cannot 
consist in depriving it of every kind of existence, since the 
representation of an object is necessarily that of the object 
existing. Such an act consists simply in declaring that the 
existence attached by our mind to the object, and in- 
separable from its representation, is an existence wholly 
ideal — that of a mere possible. But the " ideality" of an 
object, and the "simple possibility" of an object, have 
meaning only in relation to a reality that drives into the 
region of the ideal, or of the merely possible, the object 
which is incompatible with it. Suppose the stronger and 
more substantial existence annihilated : it is the attenuated 
and weaker existence of the merely possible that becomes 
the reality itself, and you will no longer be representing 
the object, then, as non-existent. In other words, and 
however strange our assertion may seem, there is more, 
and not less, in the idea of an object conceived as "not exist- 
ing" than in the idea of this same object conceived as "exist- 
ing"; for the idea of the object "not existing" is necessarily 
the idea of the object "existing" with, in addition, the repre- 
sentation of an exclusion of this object by the actual reality 
taken in block. 

But it will be claimed that our idea of the non-existent 
is not yet sufficiently cut loose from every imaginative 
element, that it is not negative enough. "No matter," 
we shall be told, "though the unreality of a thing consist 
in its exclusion by other things; we want to know nothing 
about that. Are we not free to direct our attention where 
we please and how we please? Well then, after having 
called up the idea of an object, and thereby, if you will 
have it so, supposed it existent, we shall merely couple 
to our affirmation a ' not/ and that will be enough to make 
us think it non-existent. This is an operation entirely 
intellectual, independent of what happens outside the 



iv. i THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 287 

mind. So let us think of anything or let us think of the 
totality of things, and then write in the margin of our 
thought the 'not/ which prescribes the rejection of what it 
contains: we annihilate everything mentally by the 
mere fact of decreeing its annihilation." — Here we have 
it! The very root of all the difficulties and errors with 
which we are confronted is to be found in the power ascribed 
here to negation. We represent negation as exactly 
symmetrical with affirmation. We imagine that negation, 
like affirmation, is self-sufficient. So that negation, like 
affirmation, would have the power of creating ideas, with 
this sole difference that they would be negative ideas. 
By affirming one thing, and then another, and so on ad 
infinitum, I form the idea of "All;" so, by denying one 
thing and then other things, finally by denying All, I 
arrive at the idea of Nothing. — But it is just this assimila- 
tion which is arbitrary. We fail to see that while affirma- 
tion is a complete act of the mind, which can succeed in 
building up an idea, negation is but the half of an intel- 
lectual act, of which the other half is understood, or rather 
put off to an indefinite future. We fail to see that while 
affirmation is a purely intellectual act, there enters into 
negation an element which is not intellectual, and that it 
is precisely to the intrusion of this foreign element that 
negation owes its specific character. 

To begin with the second point, let us note that to 
deny always consists in setting aside a possible affirma- 
tion. 1 Negation is only an attitude taken by the mind 
toward an eventual affirmation. When I say, "This 
table is black," I am speaking of the table; I have seen 

1 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edition, p. 737: "From the point 
of view of our knowledge in general . . . the peculiar function of 
negative propositions is simply to prevent error." Cf. Sigwart, Logik, 
2nd edition, vol. i. pp. 150 ff. 



288 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

it black, and my judgment expresses what I have seen. 
But if I say, "This table is not white," I surely do not 
express something I have perceived, for I have seen black, 
and not an absence of white. It is therefore, at bottom, 
not on the table itself that I bring this judgment to bear, 
but rather on the judgment that would declare the table 
white. I judge a judgment and not the table. The 
proposition, "This table is not white," implies that you 
might believe it white, that you did believe it such, or that 
I was going to believe it such. I warn you or myself that 
this judgment is to be replaced by another (which, it is 
true, I leave undetermined). Thus, while affirmation 
bears directly on the thing, negation aims at the thing only 
indirectly, through an interposed affirmation. An affirma- 
tive proposition expresses a judgment on an object; a 
negative proposition expresses a judgment on a judgment. 
Negation, therefore, differs from affirmation properly so 
called in that it is an affirmation of the second degree: 
it affirms something of an affirmation which itself affirms ' 
something of an object. 

But it follows at once from this that negation is not 
the work of pure mind, I should say of a mind placed 
before objects and concerned with them alone. When 
we deny, we give a lesson to others, or it may be to our- 
selves. We take to task an interlocutor, real or possible, 
whom we find mistaken and whom we put on his guard. 
He was affirming something: we tell him he ought to 
affirm something else (though without specifying the 
affirmation which must be substituted). There is no 
longer then, simply, a person and an object; there is, 
in face of the object, a person speaking to a person, oppos- 
ing him and aiding him at the same time; there is a be- 
ginning of society. Negation aims at some one, and not 
only, like a purely intellectual operation, at some thing. 



iv] THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 289 

It is of a pedagogical and social nature. It sets straight 
or rather warns, the person warned and set straight being 
possibly, by a kind of doubling, the very person that 
speaks. 

So much for the second point; now for the first. We 
said that negation is but the half of an intellectual act, 
of which the other half is left indeterminate. If I pro- 
nounce the negative proposition, "This table is not white," 
I mean that you ought to substitute for your judgment, 
"The table is white," another judgment. I give you an 
admonition, and the admonition refers to the necessity 
of a substitution. As to what you ought to substitute 
for your affirmation, I tell you nothing, it is true. This 
may be because I do not know the color of the table; 
but it is also, it is indeed even more, because the white 
color is that alone that interests us for the moment, so that I 
only need to tell you that some other color will have to be 
substituted for white, without having to say which. A 
negative judgment is therefore really one which indicates 
a need of substituting for an affirmative judgment another 
affirmative judgment, the nature of which, however, is 
not specified, sometimes because it is not known, more 
often because it fails to offer any actual interest, the 
attention bearing only on the substance of the first. 

Thus, whenever I add a "not" to an affirmation, when- 
ever I deny, I perform two very definite acts: (1) I interest 
myself in what one of my fellow-men affirms, or in what he 
was going to say, or in what might have been said by an- 
other Me, whom I anticipate; (2) I announce that some 
other affirmation, whose content I do not specify, will 
have to be substituted for the one I find before me. Now, 
in neither of these two acts is there anything but affirma- 
tion. The sui generis character of negation is due to 
superimposing the first of these acts upon the second. 



290 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

It is in vain, then, that we attribute to negation the power 
of creating ideas sui generis, symmetrical with those that 
affirmation creates, and directed in a contrary sense. No 
idea will come forth from negation, for it has no other 
content than that of the affirmative judgment which it 
judges. 

To be more precise, let us consider an existential, in- 
stead of an attributive, judgment. If I say, "The object 
A does not exist," I mean by that, first, that we might 
believe that the object A exists: how, indeed, can we think 
of the object A without thinking it existing, and, once 
again, what difference can there be between the idea of 
the object A existing and the idea pure and simple of the 
object A? Therefore, merely by saying "The object A," 
I attribute to it some kind of existence, though it be that 
of a mere possible, that is to say, of a pure idea. And 
consequently, in the judgment "The object A is not," 
there is at first an affirmation such as "The object A has 
been," or "The object A will be," or, more generally, 
"The object A exists at least as a mere possible." Now, 
when I add the two words "is not," I can only mean that 
if we go further, if we erect the possible object into a real 
object, we shall be mistaken, and that the possible of which 
I am speaking is excluded from the actual reality as 
incompatible with it. Judgments that posit the non- 
existence of a thing are therefore judgments that formu- 
late a contrast between the possible and the actual (that 
is, between two kinds of existence, one thought and the 
other found), where a person, real or imaginary, wrongly 
believes that a certain possible is realized. Instead of 
this possible, there is a reality that differs from it and re- 
jects it: the negative judgment expresses this contrast, 
but it expresses the contrast in an intentionally incomplete 
form, because it is addressed to a person who is sup- 



iv. j THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 291 

posed to be interested exclusively in the possible that is 
indicated, and is not concerned to know by what kind 
of reality the possible is replaced. The expression of 
the substitution is therefore bound to be cut short. In- 
stead of affirming that a second term is substituted for 
the first, the attention which was originally directed to 
the first term will be kept fixed upon it, and upon it alone. 
And, without going beyond the first, we shall implicitly 
affirm that a second term replaces it in saying that the 
first "is not." We shall thus judge a judgment instead 
of judging a thing. We shall warn others or warn our- 
selves of a possible error instead of supplying positive 
information. Suppress every intention of this kind, give 
knowledge back its exclusively scientific or philosophical 
character, suppose in other words that reality comes itself 
to inscribe itself on a mind that cares only for things and 
is not interested in persons: we shall affirm that such or 
such a thing is, we shall never affirm that a thing is not. 

How comes it, then, that affirmation and negation 
are so persistently put on the same level and endowed 
with an equal objectivity? How comes it that we have 
so much difficulty in recognizing that negation is sub- 
jective, artificially cut short, relative to the human mind 
and still more to the social life? The reason is, no doubt, 
that both negation and affirmation are expressed in propo- 
sitions, and that any proposition, being formed of words, 
which symbolize concepts, is something relative to social 
fife and to the human intellect. Whether I say "The 
ground is damp" or "The ground is not damp," in both 
cases the terms "ground" and "damp" are concepts more 
or less artificially created by the mind of man — extracted, 
by his free initiative, from the continuity of experience. 
In both cases the concepts are represented by the same 
conventional words. In both cases we can say indeed 



292 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

that the proposition aims at a social and pedagogical end, 
since the first would propagate a truth as the second would 
prevent an error. From this point of view, which is 
that of formal logic, to affirm and to deny are indeed 
two mutually symmetrical acts, of which the first estab- 
lishes a relation of agreement and the second a relation 
of disagreement between a subject and an attribute. 
But how do we fail to see that the symmetry is altogether 
external and the likeness superficial? Suppose language 
fallen into disuse, society dissolved, every intellectual 
initiative, every faculty of self-reflection and of self- 
judgment atrophied in man: the dampness of the ground 
will subsist none the less, capable of inscribing itself auto- 
matically in sensation and of sending a vague idea to the 
deadened intellect. The intellect will still affirm, in implicit 
terms. And consequently, neither distinct concepts, nor 
words, nor the desire of spreading the truth, nor that of 
bettering oneself, are of the very essence of the affirmation. 
But this passive intelligence, mechanically keeping step 
with experience, neither anticipating nor following the 
course of the real, would have no wish to deny. It could 
not receive an imprint of negation; for, once again, that 
which exists may come to be recorded, but the non-ex- 
istence of the non-existing cannot. For such an intellect 
to reach the point of denying, it must awake from its torpor, 
formulate the disappointment of a real or possible expect- 
ation, correct an actual or possible error — in short, propose 
to teach others or to teach itself. 

It is rather difficult to perceive this in the example 
we have chosen, but the example is indeed the more in- 
structive and the argument the more cogent on that 
account. If dampness is able automatically to come and 
record itself, it is the same, it will be said, with non-damp- 
ness; for the dry as well as the damp can give impressions 



iv.] THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 293 

to sense, which will transmit them, as more or less distinct 
ideas, to the intelligence. In this sense the negation 
of dampness is as objective a thing, as purely intellectual, 
as remote from every pedagogical intention, as affirmation. 
— But let us look at it more closely: we shall see that the 
negative proposition, "The ground is not damp," and the 
affirmative proposition, "The ground is dry," have en- 
tirely different contents. The second implies that we 
know the dry, that we have experienced the specific 
sensations, tactile or visual for example, that are at the 
base of this idea. The first requires nothing of the sort; 
it could equally well have been formulated by an intelligent 
fish, who had never perceived anything but the wet. It 
would be necessary, it is true, that this fish should have 
risen to the distinction between the real and the possible, 
and that he should care to anticipate the error of his 
fellow-fishes, who doubtless consider as alone possible 
the condition of wetness in which they actually live. Keep 
strictly to the terms of the proposition, "The ground is 
not damp," and you will find that it means two things: 
(1) that one might believe that the ground is damp, (2) 
that the dampness is replaced in fact by a certain quality x. 
This quality is left indeterminate, either because we have 
no positive knowledge of it, or because it has no actual 
interest for the person to whom the negation is addressed. 
To deny, therefore, always consists in presenting in 
an abridged form a system of two affirmations: the one 
determinate, which applies to a certain possible; the 
other indeterminate, referring to the unknown or in- 
different reality that supplants this possibility. The 
second affirmation is virtually contained in the judgment 
we apply to the first, a judgment which is negation it- 
self. And what gives negation its subjective character 
is precisely this, that in the discovery of a replacement 



294 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

it takes account only of the replaced, and is not con- 
cerned with what replaces. The replaced exists only 
as a conception of the mind. It is necessary, in order 
to continue to see it, and consequently in order to speak 
of it, to turn our back on the reality, which flows from the 
past to the present, advancing from behind. It is this 
that we do when we deny. We discover the change, 
or more generally the substitution, as a traveller would 
see the course of his carriage if he looked out behind, and 
only knew at each moment the point at which he had 
ceased to be; he could never determine his actual position 
except by relation to that which he had just quitted, in- 
stead of grasping it in itself. 

To sum up, for a mind which should follow purely 
and simply the thread of experience, there would be no 
void, no nought, even relative or partial, no possible 
negation. Such a mind would see facts succeed facts, 
states succeed states, things succeed things. What it 
would note at each moment would be things existing, 
states appearing, events happening. It would live in 
the actual, and, if it were capable of judging, it would 
never affirm anything except the existence of the present. 

Endow this mind with memory, and especially with 
the desire to dwell on the past; give it the faculty of 
dissociating and of distinguishing: it will no longer only 
note the present state of the passing reality; it will repre- 
sent the passing as a change, and therefore as a contrast 
between what has been and what is. And as there is no 
essential difference between a past that we remember 
and a past that we imagine, it will quickly rise to the idea 
of the "possible" in general. 

It will thus be shunted on to the siding of negation. 
And especially it will be at the point of representing 
a disappearance. But it will not yet have reached it. 



iv.] THE IDEA OF ' NOTHING' 295 

To represent that a thing has disappeared, it is not enough 
to perceive a contrast between the past and the present; 
it is necessary besides to turn our back on the present, 
to dwell on the past, and to think the contrast of the past 
with the present in terms of the past only, without letting 
the present appear in it. 

The idea of annihilation is therefore not a pure idea; 
it implies that we regret the past or that we conceive it 
as regrettable, that we have some reason to linger over 
it. The idea arises when the phenomenon of substitition 
is cut in two by a mind which considers only the first half, 
because that alone interests it. Suppress all interest, 
all feeling, and there is nothing left but the reality that 
flows, together with the knowledge ever renewed that it 
impresses on us of its present state. 

From annihilation to negation, which is a more general 
operation, there is now only a step. All that is necessary 
is to represent the contrast of what is, not only with what 
has been, but also with all that might have been. And 
we must express this contrast as a function of what might 
have been, and not of what is; we must affirm the existence 
of the actual while looking only at the possible. The 
formula we thus obtain no longer expresses merely a 
disappointment of the individual; it is made to correct 
or guard against an error, which is rather supposed to be 
the error of another. In this sense, negation has a peda- 
gogical and social character. 

Now, once negation is formulated, it presents an aspect 
symmetrical with that of affirmation; if affirmation affirms 
an objective reality, it seems that negation must affirm 
a non-reality equally objective, and, so to say, equally 
real. In which we are both right and wrong: wrong, 
because negation cannot be objectified, in so far as it is 
negative; right, however, in that the negation of a thing 



296 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

implies the latent affirmation of its replacement by some- 
thing else, which we systematically leave on one side. 
But the negative form of negation benefits by the affirma- 
tion at the bottom of it. Bestriding the positive solid 
reality to which it is attached, this phantom objectifies 
itself. Thus is formed the idea of the void or of a partial 
nought, a thing being supposed to be replaced, not by 
another thing, but by a void which it leaves, that is, by 
the negation of itself. Now, as this operation works on 
anything whatever, we suppose it performed on each thing 
in turn, and finally on all things in block. We thus obtain 
the idea of absolute Nothing. If now we analyze this idea 
of Nothing, we find that it is, at bottom, the idea of 
Everything, together with a movement of the mind that 
keeps jumping from one thing to another, refuses to stand 
still, and concentrates all its attention on this refusal by 
never determining its actual position except by relation 
to that which it has just left. It is therefore an idea 
eminently comprehensive and full, as full and compre- 
hensive as the idea of All, to which it is very closely akin. 

How then can the idea of Nought be opposed to that 
of All? Is it not plain that this is to oppose the full to 
the full, and that the question, "Why does something 
exist?" is consequently without meaning, a pseudo- 
problem raised about a pseudo-idea? Yet we must say 
once more why this phantom of a problem haunts the mind 
with such obstinacy. In vain do we show that in the 
idea of an "annihilation of the real" there is only the image 
of all realities expelling one another endlessly, in a circle; 
in vain do we add that the idea of non-existence is only 
that of the expulsion of an imponderable existence, or a 
"merely possible" existence, by a more substantial ex- 
istence which would then be the true reality ; in vain do we 
find in the sui generis form of negation an element which 



iv] THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 297 

is not intellectual — negation being the judgment of a 
judgment, an admonition given to some one else or to 
oneself, so that it is absurd to attribute to negation the 
power of creating ideas of a new kind, viz. ideas without 
content ; — in spite of all, the conviction persists that before 
things, or at least under things, there is "Nothing." If 
we seek the reason of this fact, we shall find it precisely 
in the feeling, in the social and, so to speak, practical 
element, that gives its specific form to negation. The 
greatest philosophic difficulties arise, as we have said, 
from the fact that the forms of human action venture 
outside of their proper sphere. We are made in order 
to act as much as, and more than, in order to think — 
or rather, when we follow the bent of our nature, it is in 
order to act that we think. It is therefore no wonder 
that the habits of action give their tone to those of thought, 
and that our mind always perceives things in the same 
order in which we are accustomed to picture them when we 
propose to act on them. Now, it is unquestionable, as 
we remarked above, that every human action has its 
starting-point in a dissatisfaction, and thereby in a feeling 
of absence. We should not act if we did not set before 
ourselves an end, and we seek a thing only because we feel 
the lack of it. Our action proceeds thus from "nothing" 
to "something," and its very essence is to embroider 
"something" on the canvas of "nothing." The truth 
is that the "nothing" concerned here is the absence not 
so much of a thing as of a utility. If I bring a visitor 
into a room that I have not yet furnished, I say to him 
that "there is nothing in it." Yet I know the room is 
full of air; but, as we do not sit on air, the room truly 
contains nothing that at this moment, for the visitor 
and for myself, counts for anything. In a general way, 
human work consists in creating utility; and, as long as 



298 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

the work is not done, there is "nothing" — nothing that we 
want. Our life is thus spent in filling voids, which our 
intellect conceives under the influence, by no means 
intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of 
vital necessities; and if we mean by void an absence of 
utility and not of things, we may say, in this quite relative 
sense, that we are constantly going from the void to the 
full: such is the direction which our action takes. Our 
speculation cannot help doing the same; and, naturally, 
it passes from the relative sense to the absolute sense, 
since it is exercised on things themselves and not on the 
utility they have for us. Thus is implanted in us the idea 
that reality fills a void, and that Nothing, conceived as 
an absence of everything, pre-exists before all things in 
right, if not in fact. It is this illusion that we have tried 
to remove by showing that the idea of Nothing, if we try 
to see in it that of an annihilation of all things, is self- 
destructive and reduced to a mere word; and that if, on 
the contrary, it is truly an idea, then we find in it as much 
matter as in the idea of All. 

This long analysis has been necessary to show that 
a self-sufficient reality is not necessarily a reality foreign 
to duration. If we pass (consciously or unconsciously) 
through the idea of the nought in order to reach that 
of being, the being to which we come is a logical or mathe- 
matical essence, therefore non-temporal. And, conse- 
quently, a static conception of the real is forced on us: 
everything appears given once for all, in eternity. But 
we must accustom ourselves to think being directly, 
without making a detour, without first appealing to 
the phantom of the nought which interposes itself be- 
tween it and us. We must strive to see in order to see, 
and no longer to see in order to act. Then the Absolute 



vi] FORM AND BECOMING 299 

is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure, in us. 
It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical 
essence. . It lives with us. Like us, but in certain aspects 
infinitely more concentrated and more gathered up in 
itself, it endures. 

But do we ever think true duration? Here again 
a direct taking possession is necessary. It is no use 
trying to approach duration: we must install ourselves 
within it straight away. This is what the intellect gener- 
ally refuses to do, accustomed as it is to think the moving 
by means of the unmovable. 

The function of the intellect is to preside over actions. 
Now, in action, it is the result that interests us; the means 
matter little provided the end is attained. Thence it 
comes that we are altogether bent on the end to be realized, 
generally trusting ourselves to it in order that the idea may 
become an act ; and thence it comes also that only the goal 
where our activity will rest is pictured explicitly to our 
mind: the movements constituting the action itself either 
elude our consciousness or reach it only confusedly. Let 
us consider a very simple act, like that of lifting the arm. 
Where should we be if we had to imagine beforehand 
all the elementary contractions and tensions this act 
involves, or even to perceive them, one by one, as they 
are accomplished? But the mind is carried immediately 
to the end, that is to say, to the schematic and simplified 
vision of the act supposed accomplished. Then, if no 
antagonistic idea neutralizes the effect of the first idea, 
the appropriate movements come of themselves to fill out 
the plan, drawn in some way by the void of its gaps. The 
intellect, then, only represents to the activity ends to 
attain, that is to say, points of rest. And, from one end 
attained to another end attained, from one rest to another 
rest, our activity is carried by a series of leaps, during 



300 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

which our consciousness is turned away as much as possible 
from the movement going on, to regard only the anticipated 
image of the movement accomplished. 

Now, in order that it may represent as unmovable 
the result of the act which is being accomplished, the 
intellect must perceive, as also unmovable, the surround- 
ings in which this result is being framed. Our activity 
is fitted into the material world. If matter appeared 
to us as a perpetual flowing, we should assign no termina- 
tion to any of our actions. We should feel each of them 
dissolve as fast as it was accomplished, and we should 
not anticipate an ever-fleeting future. In order that our 
activity may leap from an act to an act, it is necessary 
that matter should pass from a state to a state, for it is only 
into a state of the material world that action can fit a 
result, so as to be accomplished. But is it thus that matter 
presents itself? 

A 'priori we may presume that our perception manages 
to apprehend matter with this bias. Sensory organs 
and motor organs are in fact coordinated with each other. 
Now, the first symbolize our faculty of perceiving, as the 
second our faculty of acting. The organism thus evidences, 
in a visible and tangible form, the perfect accord of per- 
ception and action. So if our activity always aims at a 
result into which it is momentarily fitted, our perception 
must retain of the material world, at every moment, only 
a state in which it is provisionally placed. This is the most 
natural hypothesis. And it is easy to see that experience 
confirms it. 

From our first glance at the world, before we even 
make our bodies in it, we distinguish qualities. Color 
succeeds to color, sound to sound, resistance to resist- 
ance, etc. Each of these qualities, taken separately, is a 
state that seems to persist as such, immovable until an- 



iv] FORM AND BECOMING 301 

other replaces it. Yet each of these qualities resolves 
itself, on analysis, into an enormous number of elementary 
movements. Whether we see in it vibrations or whether 
we represent it in any other way, one fact is certain, it 
is that every quality is change. In vain, moreover, shall 
we seek beneath the change the thing which changes: 
it is always provisionally, and in order to satisfy our 
imagination, that we attach the movement to a mobile. 
The mobile flies for ever before the pursuit of science, 
which is concerned with mobility alone. In the smallest 
discernible fraction of a second, in the almost instantaneous 
perception of a sensible quality, there may be trillions 
of oscillations which repeat themselves. The permanence 
of a sensible quality consists in this repetition of move- 
ments, as the persistence of life consists in a series of pal- 
pitations. The primal function of perception is precisely 
to grasp a series of elementary changes under the form of 
a quality or of a simple state, by a work of condensation. 
The greater the power of acting bestowed upon an animal 
species, the more numerous, probably, are the elementary 
changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into 
one of its instants. And the progress must be continuous, 
in nature, from the beings that vibrate almost in unison 
with the oscillations of the ether, up to those that embrace 
trillions of these oscillations in the shortest of their simple 
perceptions. The first feel hardly anything but move- 
ments; the others perceive quality. The first are almost 
caught up in the running-gear of things; the others react, 
and the tension of their faculty of acting is probably pro- 
portional to the concentration of their faculty of per- 
ceiving. The progress goes on even in humanity itself. 
A man is so much the more a "man of action" as he can 
embrace in a glance a greater number of events: he who 
perceives successive events one by one will allow himself 



302 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to be led by them; he who grasps them as a whole will 
dominate them. In short, the qualities of matter are so 
many stable views that we take of its instability. 

Now, in the continuity of sensible qualities we mark 
off the boundaries of bodies. Each of these bodies really 
changes at every moment. In the first place, it resolves 
itself into a group of qualities, and every quality, as we said, 
consists of a succession of elementary movements. But, 
even if we regard the quality as a stable state, the body 
is still unstable in that it changes qualities without ceasing. 
The body pre-eminently — that which we are most justified 
in isolating within the continuity of matter, because it 
constitutes a relatively closed system — is the living body; 
it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others within 
the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate 
a period of this evolution in a stable view which we 
call a form, and, when the change has become considerable 
enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our per- 
ception, we say that the body has changed its form. But 
in reality the body is changing form at every moment; 
or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the 
reality is movement. What is real is the continual change 
of form : form is only a snapshot view of a transition. There- 
fore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into 
discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real. 
When the successive images do not differ from each other 
too much, we consider them all as the waxing and waning 
of a single mean image, or as the deformation of this image 
in different directions. And to this mean we really allude 
when we speak of the essence of a thing, or of the thing 
itself. 

Finally things, once constituted, show on the surface, 
by their changes of situation, the profound changes that 
are being accomplished within the Whole. We say then 



iv.) FORM AND BECOMING 303 

that they act on one another. This action appears to 
us, no doubt, in the form of movement. But from the 
mobility of the movement we turn away as much as we 
can; what interests us is, as we said above, the unmovable 
plan of the movement rather than the movement itself. 
Is it a simple movement? We ask ourselves where it is 
going. It is by its direction, that is to say, by the position 
of its provisional end, that we represent it at every moment. 
Is it a complex movement? We would know above all 
what is going on, what the movement is doing—in other 
words, the result obtained or the presiding intention. 
Examine closely what is in your mind when you speak 
of an action in course of accomplishment. The idea of 
change is there, I am willing to grant, but it is hidden in 
the penumbra. In the full light is the motionless plan 
of the act supposed accomplished. It is by this, and by 
this only, that the complex act is distinguished and defined. 
We should be very much embarrassed if we had to imagine 
the movements inherent in the actions of eating, drinking, 
fighting, etc. It is enough for us to know, in a general 
and indefinite way, that all these acts are movements. 
Once that side of the matter has been settled, we simply 
seek to represent the general plan of each of these complex 
movements, that is to say the motionless design that under- 
lies them. Here again knowledge bears on a state rather 
than on a change. It is therefore the same with this third 
case as with the others. Whether the movement be 
qualitative or evolutionary or extensive, the mind manages 
to take stable views of the instability. And thence the 
mind derives, as we have just shown, three kinds of repre- 
sentations: (1) qualities, (2) forms of essences, (3) acts. 

To these three ways of seeing correspond three categories 
of words: adjectives, substantives, and verbs, which are the 
primordial elements of language. Adjectives and sub- 



304 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

stantives therefore symbolize states. But the verb it- 
self, if we keep to the clear part of the idea it calls up, 
hardly expresses anything else. 

Now, if we try to characterize more precisely our natural 
attitude towards Becoming, this is what we find. Be- 
coming is infinitely varied. That which goes from yellow 
to green is not like that which goes from green to blue: 
they are different qualitative movements. That which 
goes from flower to fruit is not like that which goes from 
larva to nymph and from nymph to perfect insect: they 
are different evolutionary movements. The action of eat- 
ing or of drinking is not like the action of fighting: they are 
different extensive movements. And these three kinds 
of movement themselves — qualitative, evolutionary, ex- 
tensive — differ profoundly. The trick of our perception, 
like that of our intelligence, like that of our language, 
consists in extracting from these profoundly different 
becomings the single representation of becoming in general, 
undefined becoming, a mere abstraction which by itself 
says nothing and of which, indeed, it is very rarely that we 
think. To this idea, always the same, and always obscure 
or unconscious, we then join, in each particular case, one or 
several clear images that represent states and which serve 
to distinguish all becomings from each other. It is this 
composition of a specified and definite state with change 
general and undefined that we substitute for the specific 
change. An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously 
colored, so to speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so 
that we see only differences of color, that is to say, differ- 
ences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, 
hidden from our view, a becoming always and every- 
where the same, invariably colorless. 

Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture, 



iv] FORM AND BECOMING 305 

such as the marching past of a regiment. There is one 
way in which it might first occur to us to do it. That 
would be to cut out jointed figures representing the soldiers, 
to give to each of them the movement of marching, a 
movement varying from individual to individual although 
common to the human species, and to throw the whole 
on the screen. We should need to spend on this little 
game an enormous amount of work, and even then we 
should obtain but a very poor result: how could it, at its 
best, reproduce the suppleness and variety of life? Now, 
there is another way of proceeding, more easy and at 
the same time more effective. It is to take a series of 
snapshots of the passing regiment and to throw these 
instantaneous views on the screen, so that they replace 
each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph 
does. With photographs, each of which represents the 
regiment in a fixed attitude, it reconstitutes the mobility 
of the regiment marching. It is true that if we had to do 
with photographs alone, however much we might look at 
them, we should never see them animated : with immobility 
set beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make 
movement. In order that the pictures may be animated, 
there must be movement somewhere. The movement 
does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus. It is be- 
cause the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing 
in turn the different photographs of the scene to continue 
each other, that each actor of the scene recovers his mobil- 
ity; he strings all his successive attitudes on the invisible 
movement of the film. The process then consists in ex- 
tracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures 
an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement 
in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and 
we reconstitute the individuality of each particular move- 
ment by combining this nameless movement with the per- 



306 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

sonal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinemato- 
graph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead 
of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, 
we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose 
their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, 
of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of 
the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, 
abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of 
the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what 
there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. 
Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. 
Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or 
even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set 
going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may there- 
fore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion 
that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cine- 
matographical kind. 

Of the altogether practical character of this operation 
there is no possible doubt. Each of our acts aims at a 
certain insertion of our will into the reality. There is, 
between our body and other bodies, an arrangement 
like that of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleido- 
scopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement 
to a re-arrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleido- 
scope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, 
and seeing only the new picture. Our knowledge of the 
operation of nature must be exactly symmetrical, there- 
fore, with the interest we take in our own operation. In 
this sense we may say, if we are not abusing this kind of 
illustration, that the cinematographical character of our 
knowledge of things is due to the kaleidoscopic character 
of our adaptation to them. 

The cinematographical method is therefore the only 
practical method, since it consists in making the general 



rv.i FORM AND BECOMING 307 

character of knowledge form itself on that of action, 
while expecting that the detail of each act should depend 
in its turn on that of knowledge. In order that action 
may always be enlightened, intelligence must always be 
present in it; but intelligence, in order thus to accompany 
the progress of activity and ensure its direction, must 
begin by adopting its rhythm. Action is discontinuous, 
like every pulsation of life; discontinuous, therefore, is 
knowledge. The mechanism of the faculty of knowing 
has been constructed on this plan. Essentially practical, 
can it be of use, such as it is, for speculation? Let us try 
with it to follow reality in its windings, and see what will 
happen. 

I take of the continuity of a particular becoming a 
series of views, which I connect together by "becoming 
in general." But of course I cannot stop there. What 
is not determinable is not representable: of "becoming 
in general" I have only a verbal knowledge. As the 
letter x designates a certain unknown quantity, what- 
ever it may be, so my "becoming in general," always 
the same, symbolizes here a certain transition of which 
I have taken some snapshots; of the transition itself 
it teaches me nothing. Let me then concentrate myself 
wholly on the transition, and, between any two snap- 
shots, endeavor to realize what is going on. As I apply 
the same method, I obtain the same result; a third view 
merely slips in between the two others. I may begin 
again as often as I will, I may set views alongside of views 
for ever, I shall obtain nothing else. The application of 
the cinematographical method therefore leads to a perpet- 
ual recommencement, during which the mind, never able to 
satisfy itself and never finding where to rest, persuades 
itself, no doubt, that it imitates by its instability the very 
movement of the real. But though, by straining itself 



308 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to the point of giddiness, it may end by giving itself the 
illusion of mobility, its operation has not advanced it a 
step, since it remains as far as ever from its goal. In order 
to advance with the moving reality, you must replace 
yourself within it. Install yourself within change, and you 
will grasp at once both change itself and the successive 
states in which it might at any instant be immobilized. 
But with these successive states, perceived from without 
as real and no longer as potential immobilities, you will 
never reconstitute movement. Call them qualities, forms, 
positions, or intentions, as the case may be, multiply the 
number of them as you will, let the interval between 
two consecutive states be infinitely small: before the 
intervening movement you will always experience the 
disappointment of the child who tries by clapping his 
hands together to crush the smoke. The movement 
slips through the interval, because every attempt to re- 
constitute change out of states implies the absurd propo- 
sition, that movement is made of immobilities. 

Philosophy perceived this as soon as it opened its eyes. 
The arguments of Zeno of Elea, although formulated with 
a very different intention, have no other meaning. 

Take the flying arrow. At every moment, says Zeno, 
it is motionless, for it cannot have time to move, that 
is, to occupy at least two successive positions, unless at 
least two moments are allowed it. At a given moment, 
therefore, it is at rest at a given point. Motionless in 
each point of its course, it is motionless during all the time 
that it is moving. 

Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever be in a point 
of its course. Yes again, if the arrow, which is moving, 
ever coincides with a position, which is motionless. But 
the arrow never is in any point of its course. The most 
we can say is that it might be there, in this sense, that it 



iv.i FORM AND BECOMING 309 

passes there and might stop there. It is true that if it 
did stop there, it would be at rest there, and at this point 
it is no longer movement that we should have to do with. 
The truth is that if the arrow leaves the point A to fall 
down at the point B, its movement AB is as simple, as 
indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the tension 
of the bow that shoots it. As the shrapnel, bursting before 
it falls to the ground, covers the explosive zone with an 
indivisible danger, so the arrow which goes from A to B 
displays with a single stroke, although over a certain extent 
of duration, its indivisible mobility. Suppose an elastic 
stretched from A to B, could you divide its extension? 
The course of the arrow is this very extension; it is equally 
simple and equally undivided. It is a single and unique 
bound. You fix a point C in the interval passed, and say 
that at a certain moment the arrow was in C. If it had 
been there, it would have been stopped there, and you 
would no longer have had a flight from A to B, but two 
flights, one from A to C and the other from C to B, with an 
interval of rest. A single movement is entirely, by the 
hypothesis, a movement between two stops; if there are 
intermediate stops, it is no longer a single movement. 
At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the movement, 
once effected, has laid along its course a motionless tra- 
jectory on which we can count as many immobilities as 
we will. From this we conclude that the movement, 
whilst being effected, lays at each instant beneath it a position 
with which it coincides. We do not see that the trajectory 
is created in one stroke, although a certain time is re- 
quired for it; and that though we can divide at will the 
trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, 
which is an act in progress and not a thing. To suppose 
that the moving body is at a point of its course is to cut 
the course in two by a snip of the scissors at this point, 



310 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

and to substitute two trajectories for the single trajectory 
which we were first considering. It is to distinguish 
two successive acts where, by the hypothesis, there is 
only one. In short, it is to attribute to the course itself 
of the arrow everything that can be said of the interval 
that the arrow has traversed, that is to say, to admit 
a priori the absurdity that movement coincides with 
immobility. 

We shall not dwell here on the three other arguments 
of Zeno. We have examined them elsewhere. It is 
enough to point out that they all consist in applying the 
movement to the line traversed, and supposing that what 
is true of the line is true of the movement. The line, for 
example, may be divided into as many parts as we wish, 
of any length that we wish, and it is always the same line. 
From this we conclude that we have the right to suppose 
the movement articulated as we wish, and that it is always 
the same movement. We thus obtain a series of absurdi- 
ties that all express the same fundamental absurdity. But 
the possibility of applying the movement to the line tra- 
versed exists only for an observer who, keeping outside 
the movement and seeing at every instant the possibility 
of a stop, tries to reconstruct the real movement with these 
possible immobilities. The absurdity vanishes as soon 
as we adopt by thought the continuity of the real move- 
ment, a continuity of which every one of us is conscious 
whenever he lifts an arm or advances a step. We feel 
then indeed that the line passed over between two stops is 
described with a single indivisible stroke, and that we seek 
in vain to practice on the movement, which traces the line, 
divisions corresponding, each to each, with the divisions 
arbitrarily chosen of the line once it has been traced. The 
line traversed by the moving body lends itself to any kind 
of division, because it has no internal organization. But 



iv.] FORM AND BECOMING 311 

all movement is articulated inwardly. It is either an 
indivisible bound (which may occupy, nevertheless, a 
very long duration) or a series of indivisible bounds. 
Take the articulations of this movement into account, 
or give up speculating on its nature. 

When Achilles pursues the tortoise, each of his steps 
must be treated as indivisible, and so must each step of 
the tortoise. After a certain number of steps, Achilles 
will have overtaken the tortoise. There is nothing more 
simple. If you insist on dividing the two motions further, 
distinguish both on the one side and on the other, in the 
course of Achilles and in that of the tortoise, the sub- 
multiples of the steps of each of them; but respect the 
natural articulations of the two courses. As long as you 
respect them, no difficulty will arise, because you will 
follow the indications of experience. But Zeno's device 
is to reconstruct the movement of Achilles according to a 
law arbitrarily chosen. Achilles with a first step is sup- 
posed to arrive at the point where the tortoise was, with a 
second step at the point which it has moved to while he 
was making the first, and so on. In this case, Achilles 
would always have a new step to take. But obviously, 
to overtake the tortoise, he goes about it in quite another 
way. The movement considered by Zeno would only be 
the equivalent of the movement of Achilles if we could 
treat the movement as we treat the interval passed through, 
decomposable and recomposable at will. Once you sub- 
scribe to this first absurdity, all the others follow. 1 

1 That is, we do not consider the sophism of Zeno refuted by the fact 
that the geometrical progression (i+^- + ^" 2 "*"n3" r " ■ "> etc ^ — * n 
which a designates the initial distance between Achilles and the tortoise, 
and n the relation of their respective velocities — has a finite sum if 
n is greater than 1. On this point we may refer to the arguments of 
F. Evellin, which we regard as conclusive (see Evellin, Infini et quantiU, 
Paris, 1880, pp. 63-97; cf. Revue phUosophique, vol. xi., 1881, pp. 564- 



312 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

Nothing would be easier, now, than to extend Zeno's 
argument to qualitative becoming and to evolutionary 
becoming. We should find the same contradictions 
in these. That the child can become a youth, ripen to 
maturity and decline to old age, we understand when we 
consider that vital evolution is here the reality itself. 
Infancy, adolescence, maturity, old age, are mere views 
of the mind, possible stops imagined by us, from without, 
along the continuity of a progress. On the contrary, let 
childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age be given as 
integral parts of the evolution, they become real stops, and 
we can no longer conceive how evolution is possible, for 
rests placed beside rests will never be equivalent to a 
movement. How, with what is made, can we reconsti- 
tute what is being made? How, for instance, from child- 
hood once posited as a thing, shall we pass to adolescence, 
when, by the hypothesis, childhood only is given? If we 
look at it closely, we shall see that our habitual manner of 
speaking, which is fashioned after our habitual manner 
of thinking, leads us to actual logical deadlocks — dead- 
locks to which we allow ourselves to be led without anxiety, 
because we feel confusedly that we can always get out of 
them if we like: all that we have to do, in fact, is to give 
up the cinematographical habits of our intellect. When 
we say "The child becomes a man," let us take care not to 
fathom too deeply the literal meaning of the expression, 
or we shall find that, when we posit the subject "child," 
the attribute "man" does not yet apply to it, and that, 

568). The truth is that mathematics, as we have tried to show in a 
former work, deals and can deal only with lengths. It has therefore 
had to seek devices, first, to transfer to the movement, which is not a 
length, the divisibility of the line passed over, and then to reconcile 
with experience the idea (contrary to experience and full of absurdities) 
of a movement that is a length, that is, of a movement placed upon its 
trajectory and arbitrarily decomposable like it. 



iv.] FORM AND BECOMING 313 

when we express the attribute "man," it applies no more 
to the subject "child." The reality, which is the transition 
from childhood to manhood, has slipped between our 
fingers. We have only the imaginary stops "child" and 
"man," and we are very near to saying that one of these 
stops is the other, just as the arrow of Zeno is, according 
to that philosopher, at all the points of the course. The 
truth is that if language here were molded on reality, we 
should not say "The child becomes the man," but "There 
is becoming from the child to the man." In the first 
proposition, " becomes" is a verb of indeterminate meaning, 
intended to mask the absurdity into which we fall when we 
attribute the state "man" to the subject "child." It 
behaves in much the same way as the movement, always 
the same, of the cinematographical film, a movement 
hidden in the apparatus and whose function it is to super- 
pose the successive pictures on one another in order to 
imitate the movement of the real object. In the second 
proposition, "becoming" is a subject. It comes to the 
front. It is the reality itself; childhood and manhood 
are then only possible stops, mere views of the mind; 
we now have to do with the objective movement itself, 
and no longer with its cinematographical imitation. But 
the first manner of expression is alone conformable to 
our habits of language. We must, in order to adopt 
the second, escape from the cinematographical mechanism 
of thought. 

We must make complete abstraction of this mechan- 
ism, if we wish to get rid at one stroke of the theoretical 
absurdities that the question of movement raises. All 
is obscure, all is contradictoiy when we try, with states, 
to build up a transition. The obscurity is cleared up, 
the contradiction vanishes, as soon as we place ourselves 
along the transition, in order to distinguish states in it 



314 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

by making cross cuts therein in thought. The reason 
is that there is more in the transition than the series of 
states, that is to say, the possible cuts — more in the move- 
ment than the series of positions, that is to say, the possible 
stops. Only, the first way of looking at things is con- 
formable to the processes of the human mind; the second 
requires, on the contrary, that we reverse the bent of our 
intellectual habits. No wonder, then, if philosophy at first 
recoiled before such an effort. The Greeks trusted to nature, 
trusted the natural propensity of the mind, trusted language 
above all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. 
Rather than lay blame on the attitude of thought and 
language toward the course of things, they preferred to 
pronounce the course of things itself to be wrong. 

Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philoso- 
phers of the Eleatic school. And they passed it with- 
out any reservation whatever. As becoming shocks the 
habits of thought and fits ill into the molds of language, 
they declared it unreal. In spatial movement and in 
change in general they saw only pure illusion. This con- 
clusion could be softened down without changing the 
premisses, by saying that the reality changes, but that it 
ought not to change. Experience confronts us with be- 
coming: that is sensible reality. But the intelligible reality, 
that which ought to be, is more real still, and that reality 
does not change. Beneath the qualitative becoming, 
beneath the evolutionary becoming, beneath the extensive 
becoming, the mind must seek that which defies change, 
the definable quality, the form or essence, the end. Such 
was the fundamental principle of the philosophy which 
developed throughout the classic age, the philosophy of 
Forms, or, to use a term more akin to the Greek, the philoso- 
phy of Ideas. 

The word etdos, which we translate here by " Idea," has, 



iv.j PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 315 

in fact, this threefold meaning. It denotes (1) the quality, 
(2) the form or essence, (3) the end or design (in the sense 
of intention) of the act being performed, that is to say, at 
bottom, the design (in the sense of drawing) of the act sup- 
posed accomplished. These three aspects are those of the 
adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond to the three 
essential categories of language. After the explanations 
we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, 
translate etdos by "view" or rather by "moment." For 
eldos is the stable view taken of the instability of things: 
the quality, which is a moment of becoming; the form, which 
is a moment of evolution; the essence, which is the mean 
form above and below which the other forms are arranged 
as alterations of the mean; finally, the intention or mental 
design which presides over the action being accomplished, 
and which is nothing else, we said, than the material design, 
traced out and contemplated beforehand, of the action 
accomplished. To reduce things to Ideas is therefore to 
resolve becoming into its principal moments, each of these 
being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from the laws 
of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. That is to 
say that we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply 
the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the 
analysis of the real. 

But, when we put immutable Ideas at the base of the 
moving reality, a whole physics, a whole cosmology, a whole 
theology follows necessarily. We must insist on the point. 
Not that we mean to summarize in a few pages a philosophy 
so complex and so comprehensive as that of the Greeks. 
But, since we have described the cinematographical mech- 
anism of the intellect, it is important that we should show to 
what idea of reality the play of this mechanism leads. It 
is the very idea, we believe, that we find in the ancient 
philosophy. The main lines of the doctrine that was 



316 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

developed from Plato to Plotinus, passing through Aristotle 
(and even, in a certain measure, through the Stoics), have 
nothing accidental, nothing contingent, nothing that must 
be regarded as a philosopher's fancy. They indicate the 
vision that a systematic intellect obtains of the universal 
becoming when regarding it by means of snapshots, taken 
at intervals, of its flowing. So that, even to-day, we shall 
philosophize in the manner of the Greeks, we shall re- 
discover, without needing to know them, such and such 
of their general conclusions, in the exact proportion that 
we trust in the cinematographical instinct of our thought. 

We said there is more in a movement than in the suc- 
cessive positions attributed to the moving object, more 
in a becoming than in the forms passed through in turn, 
more in the evolution of form than the forms assumed one 
after another. Philosophy can therefore derive terms of 
the second kind from those of the first, but not the first 
from the second: from the first terms speculation must 
take its start. But the intellect reverses the order of the 
two groups; and, on this point, ancient philosophy pro- 
ceeds as the intellect does. It installs itself in the im- 
mutable, it posits only Ideas. Yet becoming exists: it 
is a fact. How, then, having posited immutability alone, 
shall we make change come forth from it? Not by the 
addition of anything, for, by the hypothesis, there exists 
nothing positive outside Ideas. It must therefore be by a 
diminution. So at the base of ancient philosophy lies 
necessarily this postulate : that there is more in the motion- 
less than in the moving, and that we pass from immuta- 
bility to becoming by way of diminution or attenuation. 

It is therefore something negative, or zero at most, that 
must be added to Ideas to obtain change. In that consists 
the Platonic "non-being," the Aristotelian "matter" — a 



rv.i PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 317 

metaphysical zero which, joined to the Idea, like the arith- 
metical zero to unity, multiplies it in space and time. By 
it the motionless and simple Idea is refracted into a move- 
ment spread out indefinitely. In right, there ought to be 
nothing but immutable Ideas, immutably fitted to each 
other. In fact, matter comes to add to them its void, and 
thereby lets loose the universal becoming. It is an elusive 
nothing, that creeps between the Ideas and creates endless 
agitation, eternal disquiet, like a suspicion insinuated be- 
tween two loving hearts. Degrade the immutable Ideas: 
you obtain, by that alone, the perpetual flux of things. 
The Ideas or Forms are the whole of intelligible reality, that 
is to say, of truth, in that they represent, all together, the 
theoretical equilibrium of Being. As to sensible reality, 
it is a perpetual oscillation from one side to the other of 
this point of equilibrium. 

Hence, throughout the whole philosophy of Ideas there 
is a certain conception of duration, as also of the relation 
of time to eternity. He who installs himself in becoming 
sees in duration the very life of things, the fundamental 
reality. The Forms, which the mind isolates and stores 
up in concepts, are then only snapshots of the changing 
reality. They are moments gathered along the course 
of time; and, just because we have cut the thread that 
binds them to time, they no longer endure. They tend to 
withdraw into their own definition, that is to say, into the 
artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which 
is their intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, 
if you will; but what is eternal in them is just what is un- 
real. On the contrary, if we treat becoming by the cine- 
matographical method, the Forms are no longer snapshots 
taken of the change, they are its constitutive elements, they 
represent all that is positive in Becoming. Eternity no 
longer hovers over time, as an abstraction; it underlies 



318 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

time, as a reality. Such is exactly, on this point, the atti- 
tude of the philosophy of Forms or Ideas. It establishes 
between eternity and time the same relation as between 
a piece of gold and the small change — change so small that 
payment goes on for ever without the debt being paid off. 
The debt could be paid at once with the piece of gold. It 
is this that Plato expresses in his magnificent language 
when he says that God, unable to make the world eternal, 
gave it Time, " a moving image of eternity." 1 

Hence also arises a certain conception of extension, 
which is at the base of the philosophy of Ideas, although 
it has not been so explicitly brought out. Let us imagine 
a mind placed alongside becoming, and adopting its move- 
ment. Each successive state, each quality, each form, in 
short, will be seen by it as a mere cut made by thought in 
the universal becoming. It will be found that form is 
essentially extended, inseparable as it is from the extensity 
of the becoming which has materialized it in the course of 
its flow. Every form thus occupies space, as it occupies 
time. But the philosophy of Ideas follows the inverse 
direction. It starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the 
very essence of reality. It does not take Form as a snap- 
shot of becoming; it posits Forms in the eternal; of this 
motionless eternity, then, duration and becoming are sup- 
posed to be only the degradation. Form thus posited, in- 
dependent of time, is then no longer what is found in a 
perception; it is a concept. And, as a reality of the con- 
ceptual order occupies no more of extension than it does of 
duration, the Forms must be stationed outside space as 
well as above time. Space and time have therefore neces- 
sarily, in ancient philosophy, the same origin and the same 
value. The same diminution of being is expressed both 
by extension in space and detention in time. Both of these 

1 Plato, Timaeus, 37 D. 



iv.i PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 319 

are but the distance between what is and what ought to be. 
From the standpoint of ancient philosophy, space and 
time can be nothing but the field that an incomplete reality, 
or rather a reality that has gone astray from itself, needs in 
order to run in quest of itself. Only it must be admitted 
that the field is created as the hunting progresses, and that 
the. hunting in some way deposits the field beneath it. 
Move an imaginary pendulum, a mere mathematical point, 
from its position of equilibrium: a perpetual oscillation 
is started, along which points are placed next to points, 
and moments succeed moments. The space and time 
which thus arise have no more "positivity" than the move- 
ment itself. They represent the remoteness of the position 
artificially given to the pendulum from its normal position, 
what it lacks in order to regain its natural stability. Bring 
it back to its normal position: space, time and motion 
shrink to a mathematical point. Just so, human reason- 
ings are drawn out into an endless chain, but are at once 
swallowed up in the truth seized by intuition, for their 
extension in space and time is only the distance, so to speak, 
between thought and truth. 1 So of extension and duration 
in relation to pure Forms or Ideas. The sensible forms are 
before us, ever about to recover their ideality, ever pre- 
vented by the matter they bear in them, that is to say, by 
their inner void, by the interval between what they are and 
what they ought to be. They are for ever on the point 
of recovering themselves, for ever occupied in losing them- 
selves. An inflexible law condemns them, like the rock of 
Sisyphus, to fall back when they are almost touching the 
summit, and this law, which has projected them into space 
and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their 

1 We have tried to bring out what is true and what is false in this idea, 
so far as spatiality is concerned (see Chapter III.). It seems to us 
radically false as regards duration. 



320 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and 
decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and over again, 
the infinite repetition of the cycles of celestial spheres — 
this all represents merely a certain fundamental deficit, 
in which materiality consists. Fill up this deficit : at once 
you suppress space and time, that is to say, the endlessly 
renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always 
aimed at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. 
What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. 
And past, present, and future shrink into a single moment, 
which is eternity. 

This amounts to saying that physics is but logic spoiled. 
In this proposition the whole philosophy of Ideas is sum- 
marized. And in it also is the hidden principle of the 
philosophy that is innate in our understanding. If im- 
mutability is more than becoming, form is more than 
change, and it is by a veritable fall that the logical system 
of Ideas, rationally subordinated and coordinated among 
themselves, is scattered into a physical series of objects and 
events accidentally placed one after another. The genera- 
tive idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations 
which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves 
out in words. And the more we descend from the motion- 
less idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, 
the more room is left for contingency and choice. Other 
metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen; 
an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All 
these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by 
themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative 
idea. Our ear only hears the words: it therefore per- 
ceives only accidents. But our mind, by successive boimds, 
leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the 
original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of 
words — accidents called up by accidents — to the con- 



iv] PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 321 

ception of the Idea that posits its own being. So the 
philosopher proceeds, confronted with the universe. Ex- 
perience makes to pass before his eyes phenomena which 
run, they also, one behind another in an accidental order 
determined by circumstances of time and place. This 
physical order — a degeneration of the logical order — is 
nothing else but the fall of the logical into space and time. 
But the philosopher, ascending again from the percept to 
the concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive 
reality that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing 
awa)' with the materiality that lessens being, grasps being 
itself in the immutable system of Ideas. Thus Science 
is obtained, which appears to us, complete and ready-made, 
as soon as we put back our intellect into its true place, 
correcting the deviation that separated it from the in- 
telligible. Science is not, then, a human construction. 
It is prior to our intellect, independent of it, veritably the 
generator of Things. 

And indeed, if we hold the Forms to be simply snapshots 
taken by the mind of the continuity of becoming, they must 
be relative to the mind that thinks them, they can have no 
independent existence. At most we might say that each 
of these Ideas is an ideal. But it is in the opposite hypothe- 
sis that we are placing ourselves. Ideas must then exist by 
themselves. Ancient philosophy could not escape this 
conclusion. Plato formulated it, and in vain did Aristotle 
strive to avoid it. Since movement arises from the de- 
gradation of the immutable, there could be no movement, 
consequently no sensible world, if there were not, some- 
where, immutability realized. So, having begun by refus- 
ing to Ideas an independent existence, and finding himself 
nevertheless unable to deprive them of it, Aristotle pressed 
them into each other, rolled them up into a ball, and set 
above the physical world a Form that was thus found to be 



322 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

the Form of Forms, the Idea of Ideas, or, to use his own 
words, the Thought of Thought. Such is the God of 
Aristotle — necessarily immutable and apart from what is 
happening in the world, since he is only the synthesis of 
all concepts in a single concept. It is true that no one 
of the manifold concepts could exist apart, such as it is in 
the divine unity: in vain should we look for the ideas of 
Plato within the God of Aristotle. But if only we im- 
agine the God of Aristotle in a sort of refraction of him- 
self, or simply inclining toward the world, at once the 
Platonic Ideas are seen to pour themselves out of him, 
as if they were involved in the unity of his essence: so rays 
stream out from the sun, which nevertheless did not contain 
them. It is probably this possibility of an outpouring of 
Platonic Ideas from the Aristotelian God that is meant, 
in the philosophy of Aristotle, by the active intellect, the 
vous that has been called notyztms — that is, by what is 
essential and yet unconscious in human intelligence. The 
vous Tioit]xcKos is Science entire, posited all at once, which 
the conscious, discursive intellect is condemned to re- 
construct with difficulty, bit by bit. There is then with- 
in us, or rather behind us, a possible vision of God, as 
the Alexandrians said, a vision always virtual, never 
actually realized by the conscious intellect. In this in- 
tuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it is 
that "does everything," 1 playing in relation to the dis- 
cursive intellect, which moves in time, the same role as the 
motionless Mover himself plays in relation to the movement 
of the heavens and the course of things. 

There is, then, immanent in the philosophy of Ideas, 
a particular conception of causality, which it is important 

1 Aristotle, De anima, 430 a 14 Kai taxtv o plv xocouxos vous xcb ndvxa 
yivzodac, 6 de xtb ndvra notecv, qjs 'i£cs us, o'iov xo (pais, xponov yap 
xcva na xo <pd>s nocec xd duvdp.ec ovxa ipojpaxa ivepreia %pu)p.axa. 



iv] PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 323 

to bring into full light, because it is that which each of us 
will reach when, in order to ascend to the origin of things, 
he follows to the end the natural movement of the intellect. 
True, the ancient philosophers never formulated it ex- 
plicitly. They confined themselves to drawing the con- 
sequences of it, and, in general, they have marked but 
points of view of it rather than presented it itself. Some- 
times, indeed, they speak of an attraction, sometimes of an 
impulsion exercised by the prime mover on the whole of the 
world. Both views are found in Aristotle, who shows us 
in the movement of the universe an aspiration of things 
toward the divine perfection, and consequently an ascent 
toward God, while he describes it elsewhere as the effect 
of a contact of God with the first sphere and as descending, 
consequently, from God to things. The Alexandrians, we 
think, do no more than follow this double indication when 
they speak of procession and conversion. Everything is 
derived from the first principle, and everything aspires to 
return to it. But these two conceptions of the divine 
causality can only be identified together if we bring them, 
both the one and the other, back to a third, which we hold 
to be fundamental, and which alone will enable us to under- 
stand, not only why, in what sense, things move in space 
and time, but also why there is space and time, why there 
is movement, why there are things. 

This conception, which more and more shows through 
the reasonings of the Greek philosophers as we go from 
Plato to Plotinus, we may formulate thus: The affirmation 
of a reality implies the simultaneous affirmation of all the 
degrees of reality intermediate between it and nothing. The 
principle is evident in the case of number: we cannot 
affirm the number 10 without thereby affirming the exis- 
tence of the numbers 9, 8, 7, . . ., etc. — in short, of the whole 
interval between 10 and zero. But here our mind passes 



324 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

naturally from the sphere of quantity to that of quality. 
It seems to us that, a certain perfection being given, the 
whole continuity of degradations is given also between this 
perfection, on the one hand, and the nought, on the other 
hand, that we think we conceive. Let us then posit the 
God of Aristotle, thought of thought — that is, thought 
making a circle, transforming itself from subject to object 
and from object to subject by an instantaneous, or rather 
an eternal, circular process: as, on the other hand, the 
nought appears to posit itself, and as, the two extremities 
being given, the interval between them is equally given, 
it follows that all the descending degrees of being, from the 
divine perfection down to the "absolute nothing," are 
realized automatically, so to speak, when we have posited 
God. 

Let us then run through this interval from top to bottom. 
First of all, the slightest diminution of the first principle 
will be enough to precipitate Being into space and time; 
but duration and extension, which represent this first 
diminution, will be as near as possible to the divine inex- 
tension and eternity. We must therefore picture to our- 
selves this first degradation of the divine principle as a 
sphere turning on itself, imitating, by the perpetuity of its 
circular movement, the eternity of the circle of the divine 
thought; creating, moreover, its own place, and thereby 
place in general, 1 since it includes without being included 
and moves without stirring from the spot; creating also 
its own duration, and thereby duration in general, since its 
movement is the measure of all motion. 2 Then, by de- 

1 De caelo, ii. 287 a 12 xrjs eoydxT)s nepupopas ouxe kivov loxcv e^ajdev 
ouxe xotzos. Phys. iv. 212 a 34 xb de nav eaxc pkv <hs ncvfjoexcu eoxc 
d'cbs do. ws p.ev yap oXov, dp.a xbv xoizov o'o [xexaftaXXet. kOkXm 31 
Kivqoexac, x<Sv jiopuov yap ouxos b xotzos. 

2 De caelo, i. 279 a 12 oude xfrovos kox\v esco xou oupavou. Phys. viii. 
251 b 27 o xpovos nddos xc kcvtjoecos. 



iv.] PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 325 

grees, we shall see the perfection decrease, more and more, 
down to our sublunary world, in which the cycle of birth, 
growth and decay imitates and mars the original circle for 
the last time. So understood, the causal relation between 
God and the world is seen as an attraction when regarded 
from below, as an impulsion or a contact when regarded 
from above, since the first heaven, with its circular move- 
ment, is an imitation of God and all imitation is the re- 
ception of a form. Therefore, we perceive God as efficient 
cause or as final cause, according to the point of view. 
And yet neither of these two relations is the ultimate 
causal relation. The true relation is that which is found 
between the two members of an equation, when the first 
member is a single term and the second a sum of an end- 
less number of terms. It is, we may say, the relation of 
the gold-piece to the small change, if we suppose the change 
to offer itself automatically as soon as the gold piece is 
presented. Only thus can we understand why Aristotle 
has demonstrated the necessity of a first motionless mover, 
not by founding it on the assertion that the movement 
of things must have had a beginning, but, on the contrary, 
by affirming that this movement could not have begun and 
can never come to an end. If movement exists, or, in 
other words, if the small change is being counted, the gold- 
piece is to be found somewhere. And if the counting goes 
on for ever, having never begun, the single term that is 
eminently equivalent to it must be eternal. A perpetuity 
of mobility is possible only if it is backed by an eternity 
of immutability, which it unwinds in a chain without be- 
ginning or end. 

Such is the last word of the Greek philosophy. We have 
not attempted to reconstruct it a 'priori. It has manifold 
origins. It is connected by many invisible threads to 
the soul of ancient Greece. Vain, therefore, the effort 



326 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [ohap. 

to deduce it from a simple principle. 1 But if everything 
that has come from poetry, religion, social life and a still 
rudimentary physics and biology be removed from it, if 
we take away all the light material that may have been 
used in the construction of the stately building, a solid 
framework remains, and this framework marks out the 
main lines of a metaphysic which is, we believe, the natural 
metaphysic of the human intellect. We come to a philoso- 
phy of this kind, indeed, whenever we follow to the end, 
the cinematographical tendency of perception and thought. 
Our perception and thought begin by substituting for the 
continuity of evolutionary change a series of unchangeable 
forms which are turn by turn, "caught on the wing," like 
the rings at a merry-go-round, which the children unhook 
with their little stick as they are passing. Now, how can 
the forms be passing, and on what "stick" are they strung? 
As the stable forms have been obtained by extracting from 
change everything that is definite, there is nothing left, 
to characterize the instability on which the forms are laid, 
but a negative attribute, which must be indetermination 
itself. Such is the first proceeding of our thought: it 
dissociates each change into two elements — the one stable, 
definable for each particular case, to wit, the Form; the 
other indefinable and always the same, Change in general. 
And such, also, is the essential operation of language. 
Forms are all that it is capable of expressing. It is reduced 
to taking as understood or is limited to suggesting a mo- 
bility which, just because it is always unexpressed, is 
thought to remain in all cases the same. — Then comes in a 
philosophy that holds the dissociation thus effected by 
thought and language to be legitimate. What can it do, 

1 Especially have we left almost entirely on one side those admirable 
but somewhat fugitive intuitions that Plotinus was later to seize, to 
study and to fix. 



nr.j PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 327 

except objectify the distinction with more force, push it 
to its extreme consequences, reduce it into a system? It 
will therefore construct the real, on the one hand, with 
definite Forms or immutable elements, and, on the other, 
with a principle of mobility which, being the negation of 
the form, will, by the hypothesis, escape all definition and be 
the purely indeterminate. The more it directs its attention 
to the forms delineated by thought and expressed by 
language, the more it will see them rise above the sensible 
and become subtilized into pure concepts, capable of enter- 
ing one within the other, and even of being at last massed 
together into a single concept, the synthesis of all reality, 
the achievement of all perfection. The more, on the con- 
trary, it descends toward the invisible source of the uni- 
versal mobility, the more it will feel this mobility sink 
beneath it and at the same time become void, vanish into 
what it will call the " non-being." Finally, it will have 
on the one hand the system of ideas, logically coordinated 
together or concentrated into one only, on the other a 
quasi-nought, the Platonic " non-being" or the Aristotelian 
"matter." — But, having cut your cloth, you must sew it. 
With supra-sensible Ideas and an infra-sensible non-being, 
you now have to reconstruct the sensible world. You can 
do so only if you postulate a kind of metaphysical necessity 
in virtue of which the confronting of this All with this 
Zero is equivalent to the affirmation of all the degrees of 
reality that measure the interval between them — just as an 
undivided number, when regarded as a difference between 
itself and zero, is revealed as a certain sum of units, and 
with its own affirmation affirms all the lower numbers. 
That is the natural postulate. It is that also that we per- 
ceive as the base of the Greek philosophy. In order then 
to explain the specific characters of each of these degrees 
of intermediate reality, nothing more is necessary than 



328 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to measure the distance that separates it from the integral 
reality. Each lower degree consists in a diminution of 
the higher, and the sensible newness that we perceive in it 
is resolved, from the point of view of the intelligible, into a 
new quantity of negation which is superadded to it. The 
smallest possible quantity of negation, that which is found 
already in the highest forms of sensible reality, and con- 
sequently a fortiori in the lower forms, is that which is 
expressed by the most general attributes of sensible reality, 
extension and duration. By increasing degradations we 
will obtain attributes more and more special. Here the 
philosopher's fancy will have free scope, for it is by an 
arbitrary decree, or at least a debatable one, that a particu- 
lar aspect of the sensible world will be equated with a 
particular diminution of being. We shall not necessarily 
end, as Aristotle did, in a world consisting of concentric 
spheres turning on themselves. But we shall be led to an 
analogous cosmology — I mean, to a construction whose 
pieces, though all different, will have none the less the same 
relations between them. And this cosmology will be 
ruled by the same principle. The physical will be denned 
by the logical. Beneath the changing phenomena will 
appear to us, by transparence, a closed system of concepts 
subordinated to and coordinated with each other. Science, 
understood as the system of concepts, will be more real 
than the sensible reality. It will be prior to human know- 
ledge, which is only able to spell it letter by letter; prior 
also to things, which awkwardly try to imitate it. It 
would only have to be diverted an instant from itself 
in order to step out of its eternity and thereby coincide 
with all this knowledge and all these things. Its immu- 
tability is therefore, indeed, the cause of the universal 
becoming. 
Such was the point of view of ancient philosophy in 



iv.j MODERN SCIENCE 329 

regard to change and duration. That modern philosophy 
has repeatedly, but especially in its beginnings, had the 
wish to depart from it, seems to us unquestionable. But 
an irresistible attraction brings the intellect back to its 
natural movement, and the metaphysic of the moderns 
to the general conclusions of the Greek metaphysic. We 
must try to make this point clear, in order to show by what 
invisible threads our mechanistic philosophy remains 
bound to the ancient philosophy of Ideas, and how also it 
responds to the requirements, above all practical, of our 
understanding. 

Modern, like ancient, science proceeds according to the 
cinematographical method. It cannot do otherwise; all 
science is subject to this law. For it is of the essence of 
science to handle signs, which it substitutes for the objects 
themselves. These signs undoubtedly differ from those 
of language by their greater precision and their higher 
efficacy; they are none the less tied down to the general 
condition of the sign, which is to denote a fixed aspect of 
the reality under an arrested form. In order to think 
movement, a constantly renewed effort of the mind is 
necessary. Signs are made to dispense us with this effort 
by substituting, for the moving continuity of things, an 
artificial reconstruction which is its equivalent in practice 
and has the advantage of being easily handled. But let 
us leave aside the means and consider only the end. What 
is the essential object of science? It is to enlarge our 
influence over things. Science may be speculative in its 
form, disinterested in its immediate ends; in other words 
we may give it as long a credit as it wants. But, however 
long the day of reckoning may be put off, some time or 
other the payment must be made. It is always then, in 
short, practical utility that science has in view. Even 



330 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

when it launches into theory, it is bound to adapt its be- 
havior to the general form of practice. However high 
it may .rise, it must be ready to fall back into the field of 
action, and at once to get on its feet. This would not be 
possible for it, if its rhythm differed absolutely from that 
of action itself. Now action, we have said, proceeds by 
leaps. To act is to re-adapt oneself. To know, that is to 
say, to foresee in order to act, is then to go from situation 
to situation, from arrangement to rearrangement. Science 
may consider rearrangements that come closer and closer 
to each other; it may thus increase the number of moments 
that it isolates, but it always isolates moments. As to 
what happens in the interval between the moments, science 
is no more concerned with that than are our common in- 
telligence, our senses and our language: it does not bear 
on the interval, but only on the extremities. So the cine- 
matographical method forces itself upon our science, as it 
did already on that of the ancients. 

Wherein, then, is the difference between the two sciences? 
We indicated it when we said that the ancients reduced the 
physical order to the vital order, that is to say, laws to 
genera, while the moderns try to resolve genera into laws. 
But we have to look at it in another aspect, which, more- 
over, is only a transposition, of the first. Wherein consists 
the difference of attitude of the two sciences toward change? 
We may formulate it by saying that ancient science thinks 
it knows its object sufficiently when it has noted of it some 
privileged moments, whereas modem science considers the 
object at any moment whatever. 

The forms or ideas of Plato or of Aristotle correspond 
to privileged or salient moments in the history of things — 
those, in general, that have been fixed by language. They 
are supposed, like the childhood or the old age of a living 
being, to characterize a period of which they express the 



iv.] MODERN SCIENCE 331 

quintessence, all the rest of this period being filled by the 
passage, of no interest in itself, from one form to another 
form. Take, for instance, a falling body. It was thought 
that we got near enough to the fact when we characterized 
it as a whole: it was a movement downward; it was the 
tendency toward a centre; it was the natural movement 
of a body which, separated from the earth to which it be- 
longed, was now going to find its place again. They noted, 
then, the final term or culminating point (riXos, a/c/iij) and 
set it up as the essential moment: this moment, that 
language has retained in order to express the whole of 
the fact, sufficed also for science to characterize it. In the 
physics of Aristotle, it is by the concepts "high" and "low," 
spontaneous displacement and forced displacement, own 
place and strange place, that the movement of a body shot 
into space or falling freely is defined. But Galileo thought 
there was no essential moment, no privileged instant. To 
study the falling body is to consider it at it matters not 
what moment in its course. The true science of gravity 
is that which will determine, for any moment of time what- 
ever, the position of the body in space. For this, indeed, 
signs far more precise than those of language are required. 
We may say, then, that our physics differs from that of 
the ancients chiefly in the indefinite breaking up of time. 
For the ancients, time comprises as many undivided periods 
as our natural perception and our language cut out in it 
successive facts, each presenting a kind of individuality. 
For that reason, each of these facts admits, in their view, 
of only a total definition or description. If, in describing 
it, we are led to distinguish phases in it, we have several 
facts instead of a single one, several undivided periods in- 
stead of a single period; but time is always supposed to be 
divided into determinate periods, and the mode of division 
to be forced on the mind by apparent crises of the real, 



332 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

comparable to that of puberty, by the apparent release of a 
new form. — For a Kepler or a Galileo, on the contrary, 
time is not divided objectively in one way or another by 
the matter that fills it. It has no natural articulations. 
We can, we ought to, divide it as we please. All moments 
count. None of them has the right to set itself up as a 
moment that represents or dominates the others. And, 
consequently, we know a change only when we are able 
to determine what it is about at any one of its moments. 

The difference is profound. In fact, in a certain aspect 
it is radical. But, from the point of view from which we 
are regarding it, it is a difference of degree rather than of 
kind. The human mind has passed from the first kind of 
knowledge to the second through gradual perfecting, simply 
by seeking a higher precision. There is the same relation 
between these two sciences as between the noting of the 
phases of a movement by the eye and the much more 
complete recording of these phases by instantaneous pho- 
tography. It is the same cinematographical mechanism in 
both cases, but it reaches a precision in the second that it 
cannot have in the first. Of the gallop of a horse our eye 
perceives chiefly a characteristic, essential or rather sche- 
matic attitude, a form that appears to radiate over a whole 
period and so fill up a time of gallop. It is this attitude 
that sculpture has fixed on the frieze of the Parthenon. 
But instantaneous photography isolates any moment; it 
puts them all in the same rank, and thus the gallop of a 
horse spreads out for it into as many successive attitudes 
as it wishes, instead of massing itself into a single attitude, 
which is supposed to flash out in a privileged moment and 
to illuminate a whole period. 

From this original difference flow all the others. A 
science that considers, one after the other, undivided periods 
of duration, sees nothing but phases succeeding phases, 



nr.l MODERN SCIENCE 333 

forms replacing forms; it is content with a qualitative de- 
scription of objects, which it likens to organized beings. 
But when we seek to know what happens within one of 
these periods, at any moment of time, we are aiming at 
something entirely different. The changes which are pro- 
duced from one moment to another are no longer, by the 
hypothesis, changes of quality; they are quantitative vari- 
ations, it may be of the phenomenon itself, it may be of its 
elementary parts. We were right then to say that modern 
science is distinguishable from the ancient in that it applies 
to magnitudes and proposes first and foremost to measure 
them. The ancients did indeed try experiments, and on 
the other hand Kepler tried no experiment, in the proper 
sense of the word, in order to discover a law which is the 
very type of scientific knowledge as we understand it. 
What distinguishes modern science is not that it is experi- 
mental, but that it experiments and, more generally, works 
only with a view to measure. 

For that reason it is right, again, to say that ancient 
science applied to concepts, while modern science seeks 
laws — constant relations between variable magnitudes. 
The concept of circularity was sufficient to Aristotle to 
define the movement of the heavenly bodies. But, even 
with the more accurate concept of elliptical form, Kepler 
did not think he had accounted for the movement of planets. 
He had to get a law, that is to say, a constant relation be- 
tween the quantitative variations of two or several elements 
of the planetary movement. 

Yet these are only consequences — differences that follow 
from the fundamental difference. It did happen to the 
ancients accidentally to experiment with a view to measur- 
ing, as also to discover a law expressing a constant relation 
between magnitudes. The principle of Archimedes is a 
true experimental law. It takes into account three variable 



334 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

magnitudes : the volume of a body, the density of the liquid 
in which the body is immersed, the vertical pressure that 
is being exerted. And it states indeed that one of these 
three terms is a function of the other two. 

The essential, original difference must therefore be sought 
elsewhere. It is the same that we noticed first. The 
science of the ancients is static. Either it considers in 
block the change that it studies, or, if it divides the change 
into periods, it makes of each of these periods a block in its 
turn: which amounts to saying that it takes no account 
of time. But modern science has been built up around 
the discoveries of Galileo and of Kepler, which immediately 
furnished it with a model. Now, what do the laws of 
Kepler say? They lay down a relation between the areas 
described by the heliocentric radius-vector of a planet and 
the time employed in describing them, a relation between 
the longer axis of the orbit and the time taken up by the 
course. And what was the principle discovered by Galileo? 
A law which connected the space traversed by a falling 
body with the time occupied by the fall. Furthermore, 
in what did the first of the great transformations of geometry 
in modern times consist, if not in introducing — in a veiled 
form, it is true — time and movement even in the considera- 
tion of figures? For the ancients, geometry was a purely 
static science. Figures were given to it at once, completely 
finished, like the Platonic Ideas. But the essence of the 
Cartesian geometry (although Descartes did not give it 
this form) was to regard every plane curve as described 
by the movement of a point on a movable straight line 
which is displaced, parallel to itself, along the axis of the 
abscissae — the displacement of the movable straight line 
being supposed to be uniform and the abscissa thus be- 
coming representative of the time. The curve is then 
defined if we can state the relation connecting the space 



rr.i MODERN SCIENCE 335 

traversed on the movable straight line to the time employed 
in traversing it, that is, if we are able to indicate the po- 
sition of the movable point, on the straight line which it 
traverses, at any moment whatever of its course. This 
relation is just what we call the equation of the curve. To 
substitute an equation for a figure consists, therefore, in 
seeing the actual position of the moving points in the tra- 
cing of the curve at any moment whatever, instead of re- 
garding this tracing all at once, gathered up in the unique 
moment when the curve has reached its finished state. 

Such, then, was the directing idea of the reform by which 
both the science of nature and mathematics, which serves 
as its instrument, were renewed. Modern science is the 
daughter of astronomy; it has come down from heaven 
to earth along the inclined plane of Galileo, for it is through 
Galileo that Newton and his successors are connected with 
Kepler. Now, how did the astronomical problem present 
itself to Kepler? The question was, knowing the respective 
positions of the planets at a given moment, how to calculate 
their positions at any other moment. So the same question 
presented itself, henceforth, for every material system. 
Each material point became a rudimentary planet, and the 
main question, the ideal problem whose solution would 
yield the key to all the others was, the positions of these 
elements at a particular moment being given, how to de- 
termine their relative positions at any moment. No doubt 
the problem cannot be put in these precise terms except 
in very simple cases, for a schematized reality; for we 
never know the respective positions of the real elements 
of matter, supposing there are real elements ; and, even if 
we knew them at a given moment, the calculation of their 
positions at another moment would generally require a 
mathematical effort surpassing human powers. But it is 
enough for us to know that these elements might be known, 



336 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

that their present positions might be noted, and that a 
superhuman intellect might, by submitting these data to 
mathematical operations, determine the positions of the 
elements at any other moment of time. This conviction 
is at the bottom of the questions we put to ourselves on 
the subject of nature, and of the methods we employ to 
solve them. That is why every law in static form seems 
to us as a provisional instalment or as a particular view 
of a dynamic law which alone would give us whole and 
definitive knowledge. 

Let us conclude, then, that our science is not only dis- 
tinguished from ancient science in this, that it seeks laws, 
nor even in this, that its laws set forth relations between 
magnitudes: we must add that the magnitude to which 
we wish to be able to relate all others is time, and that 
modern science must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration 
to take time as an independent variable. But with what 
time has it to do? 

We have said before, and we cannot repeat too often, 
that the science of matter proceeds like ordinary know- 
ledge. It perfects this knowledge, increases its precision 
and its scope, but it works in the same direction and puts 
the same mechanism into play. If, therefore, ordinary- 
knowledge, by reason of the cinematographical mechanism 
to which it is subjected, forbears to follow becoming in so 
far as becoming is moving, the science of matter renounces 
it equally. No doubt, it distinguishes as great a number 
of moments as we wish in the interval of time it considers. 
However small the intervals may be at which it stops, it 
authorizes us to divide them again if necessary. In con- 
trast with ancient science, which stopped at certain so- 
called essential moments, it is occupied indifferently with 
any moment whatever. But it always considers moments, 
always virtual stopping-places, always, in short, immobili- 



it.] MODERN SCIENCE 337 

ties. Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as 
a flux, or, in other words, as the very mobility of being, 
escapes the hold of scientific knowledge. We have already 
tried to establish this point in a former work. We alluded to 
it again in the first chapter of this book. But it is necessary 
to revert to it once more, in order to clear up misunder- 
standings. 

When positive science speaks of time, what it refers to 
is the movement of a certain mobile T on its trajectory. 
This movement has been chosen by it as representative 
of time, and it is, by definition, uniform. Let us call T 1} 
T 2 , T 3 , . . . etc., points which divide the trajectory 
of the mobile into equal parts from its origin T . We shall 
say that 1. 2, 3, . . . units of time have flowed past, 
when the mobile is at the points T 1} T 2 , T 3 , . . . of the 
line it traverses. Accordingly, to consider the state of the 
universe at the end of a certain time t, is to examine where 
it will be when T is at the point T, of its course. But of the 
flux itself of time, still less of its effect on consciousness, 
there is here no question; for there enter into the calculation 
only the points T v T 2 , T 3 , . . . taken on the flux, never 
the flux itself. We may narrow the time considered as 
much as we will, that is, break up at will the interval be- 
tween two consecutive divisions T n and T^^; but it is 
always with points, and with points only, that we are deal- 
ing. What we retain of the movement of the mobile T 
are positions taken on its trajectory. What we retain of 
all the other points of the universe are their positions on 
their respective trajectories. To each virtual stop of the 
moving body T at the points of division T lf T 2 , T 3 , . 
we make correspond a virtual stop of all the other mobiles 
at the points where they are passing. And when we say 
that a movement or any other change has occupied a time 
t, we mean by it that we have noted a number t of corre- 



338 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

spondences of this kind. We have therefore counted 
simultaneities; we have not concerned ourselves with the 
flux that goes from one to another. The proof of this is 
that I can, at discretion, vary the rapidity of the flux of 
the universe in regard to a consciousness that is independent 
of it and that would perceive the variation by the quite 
qualitative feeling that it would have of it: whatever the 
variation had been, since the movement of T would partici- 
pate in this variation, I should have nothing to change in 
my equations nor in the numbers that figure in them. 

Let us go further. Suppose that the rapidity of the 
flux becomes infinite. Imagine, as we said in the first pages 
of this book, that the trajectory of the mobile T is given 
at once, and that the whole history, past, present and future, 
of the material universe is spread out instantaneously 
in space. The same mathematical correspondences will 
subsist between the moments of the history of the world 
unfolded like a fan, so to speak, and the divisions T 1; T 2 , T 3 , 
... of the line which will be called, by definition, "the 
course of time." In the eyes of science nothing will have 
changed. But if, time thus spreading itself out in space 
and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has noth- 
ing to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, 
in what it tells us, it takes account neither of succession 
in what of it is specific nor of time in what there is in it that 
is fluent. It has no sign to express what strikes our con- 
sciousness in succession and duration. It no more applies 
to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges 
thrown here and there across the stream follow the water 
that flows under their arches. 

Yet succession exists; I am conscious of it; it is a fact. 
When a physical process is going on before my eyes, my 
perception and my inclination have nothing to do with 
accelerating or retarding it. What is important to the 



iv.j MODERN SCIENCE 339 

physicist is the number of units of duration the process 
fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves 
and that is why the successive states of the world might 
be spread out all at once in space without his having to 
change anything in his science or to cease talking about 
time. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that 
matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we 
feel and live the intervals themselves. Now, we are con- 
scious of these intervals as of definite intervals. Let me 
come back again to the sugar in my glass of water: 1 why 
must I wait for it to melt? While the duration of the 
phenomenon is relative for the physicist, since it is reduced 
to a certain number of units of time and the units them- 
selves are indifferent, this duration is an absolute for my 
consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of 
impatience which is rigorously determined. Whence 
comes this determination? What is it that obliges me to 
wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration 
which is forced upon me, over which I have no power? 
If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, 
has no real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does 
the universe unfold its successive states with a velocity 
which, in regard to my consciousness, is a veritable abso- 
lute? Why with this particular velocity rather than any 
other? Why not with an infinite velocity? Why, in other 
words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of the 
cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more 
it seems to me that, if the future is bound to succeed the 
present instead of being given alongside of it, it is because 
the future is not altogether determined at the present 
moment, and that if the time taken up by this succession 
is something other than a number, if it has for the con- 
sciousness that is installed in it absolute value and reality, 

1 See page 10. 



340 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

it is because there is unceasingly being created in it, not 
indeed in any such artificially isolated system as a glass 
of sugared water, but in the concrete whole of which every 
such system forms part, something unforeseeable and new. 
This duration may not be the fact of matter itself, but that 
of the life which reascends the course of matter; the two 
movements are none the less mutually dependent upon each 
other. The duration of the universe must therefore be one 
with the latitude of creation which can find place in it. 

When a child plays at reconstructing a picture by putting 
together the separate pieces in a puzzle game, the more he 
practices, the more and more quickly he succeeds. The 
reconstruction was, moreover, instantaneous, the child 
found it ready-made, when he opened the box on leaving 
the shop. The operation, therefore, does not require a 
definite time, and indeed, theoretically, it does not require 
any time. That is because the result is given. It is be- 
cause the picture is already created, and because to obtain 
it requires only a work of recomposing and rearranging — 
a work that can be supposed going faster and faster, and 
even infinitely fast, up to the point of being instantaneous. 
But, to the artist who creates a picture by drawing it from 
the depths of his soul, time is no longer an accessory ; it is 
not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened with- 
out the content being altered. The duration of his work 
is part and parcel of his work. To contract or to dilate 
it would be to modify both the psychical evolution that 
fills it and the invention which is its goal. The time taken 
up by the invention, is one with the invention itself. It 
is the progress of a thought which is changing in the degree 
and measure that it is taking form. It is a vital process, 
something like the ripening of an idea. 

The painter is before his canvas, the colors are on the 
palette, the model is sitting — all this we see, and also we 



it.) MODERN SCIENCE 341 

know the painter's style: do we foresee what will appear 
on the canvas? We possess the elements of the problem; 
we know in an abstract way, how it will be solved, for the 
portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely 
resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings 
with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything 
in a, work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time. 
Nought as matter, it creates itself as form. The sprouting 
and flowering of this form are stretched out on an un- 
shrinkable duration, which is one with their essence. So 
of the works of nature. Their novelty arises from an inter- 
nal impetus which is progress or succession, which confers 
on succession a peculiar virtue or which owes to succes- 
sion the whole of its virtue — which, at any rate, makes 
succession, or continuity of interpenetration in time, irre- 
ducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space. 
This is why the idea of reading in a present state of the 
material universe the future of living forms, and of unfold- 
ing now their history yet to come, involves a veritable 
absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to bring out, 
because our memory is accustomed to place alongside of 
each other, in an ideal space, the terms it perceives in turn, 
because it always represents past succession in the form of 
juxtaposition. It is able to do so, indeed, just because the 
past belongs to that which is already invented, to the dead, 
and no longer to creation and to life. Then, as the succes- 
sion to come will end by being a succession past, we per- 
suade ourselves that the duration to come admits of the 
same treatment as past duration, that it is, even now, un- 
reliable, that the future is there, rolled up, already painted 
on the canvas. An illusion, no doubt, but an illusion that 
is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as the 
human mind! 

Time is invention or it is nothing at all. But of time- 



* 



342 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

invention physics can take no account, restricted as it is 
to the cinematographical method. It is limited to count- 
ing simultaneities between the events that make up this 
time and the positions of the mobile T on its trajectory. 
It detaches these events from the whole, which at every 
moment puts on a new form and which communicates to 
them something of its novelty. It considers them in the 
abstract, such as they would be outside of the living whole, 
that is to say, in a time unrolled in space. It retains only 
the events or systems of events that can be thus isolated 
without being made to undergo too profound a deformation, 
because only these lend themselves to the application of 
its method. Our physics dates from the day when it was 
known how to isolate such systems. To sum up, while 
modern physics is distinguished from ancient physics by the 
fact that it considers any moment of time whatever, it rests 
altogether on a substitution of time-length for time-invention. 
It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second 
kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could 
have retained what physics allowed to escape. On the 
flux itself of duration science neither would nor could lay 
hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method. 
This second kind of knowledge would have set the cinemato- 
graphical method aside. It would have called upon the 
mind to renounce its most cherished habits. It is within 
becoming that it would have transported us by an effort of 
sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a mov- 
ing body will be, what shape a system will take, through 
what state a change will pass at a given moment : the mo- 
ments of time, which are only arrests of our attention, 
would no longer exist ; it is the flow of time, it is the very 
flux of the real that we should be trying to follow. The 
first kind of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to 
foresee the future and of making us in some measure masters 



iv.j MODERN SCIENCE 343 

of events; in return, it retains of the moving reality only 
eventual immobilities, that is to say, views taken of it by 
our mind. It symbolizes the real and transposes it into 
the human rather than expresses it. The other knowledge, 
if it is possible, is practically useless, it will not extend 
our empire over nature, it will even go against certain 
natural aspirations of the intellect; but, if it succeeds, it is 
reality itself that it will hold in a firm and final embrace. 
Not only may we thus complete the intellect and its know- 
ledge of matter by accustoming it to install itself within 
the moving, but by developing also another faculty, com- 
plementary to the intellect, we may open a perspective on 
the other half of the real. For, as soon as we are con- 
fronted with true duration, we see that it means creation, 
and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can only 
be because it is inseparably bound to what is making itself. 
Thus will appear the necessity of a continual growth of the 
universe, I should say of a life of the real. And thus will 
be seen in a new light the life which we find on the surface 
of our planet, a life directed the same way as that of the 
universe, and inverse of materiality. To intellect, in short, 
there will be added intuition. 

The more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that this 
conception of metaphysics is that which modern science 
suggests. 

For the ancients, indeed, time is theoretically negligible, 
because the duration of a thing only manifests the degra- 
dation of its essence: it is with this motionless essence 
that science has to deal. Change being only the effort of a 
form toward its own realization, the realization is all that 
it concerns us to know. No doubt the realization is never 
complete: it is this that ancient philosophy expresses by 
saying that we do not perceive form without matter. But 
if we consider the changing object at a certain essential 



344 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

moment, at its apogee, we may say that there it just touches 
its intelligible form. This intelligible form, this ideal and, 
so to speak, limiting form, our science seizes upon. And 
possessing in this the gold-piece, it holds eminently the 
small money which we call becoming or change. This 
change is less than being. The knowledge that would take 
it for object, supposing such knowledge were possible, 
would be less than science. 

But, for a science that places all the moments of time 
in the same rank, that admits no essential moment, no 
culminating point, no apogee, change is no longer a dimin- 
ution of essence, duration is not a dilution of eternity. The 
flux of time is the reality itself, and the things which we 
study are the things which flow. It is true that of this 
flowing reality we are limited to taking instantaneous 
views. But, just because of this, scientific knowledge must 
appeal to another knowledge to complete it. While the 
ancient conception of scientific knowledge ended in making 
time a degradation, and change the diminution of a form 
given from all eternity — on the contrary, by following the 
new conception to the end, we should come to see in time 
a progressive growth of the absolute, and in the evolution 
of things a continual invention of forms ever new. 

It is true that it would be to break with the metaphysics 
of the ancients. They saw only one way of knowing defi- 
nitely. Their science consisted in a scattered and frag- 
mentary metaphysics, their metaphysics in a concentrated 
and systematic science. Their science and metaphysics 
were, at most, two species of one and the same genus. In 
our hypothesis, on the contrary, science and metaphysics 
are two opposed although complementary ways of knowing, 
the first retaining only moments, that is to say, that which 
does not endure, the second bearing on duration itself. 
Now, it was natural to hesitate between so novel a con- 



iv.] DESCARTES 345 

ception of metaphysics and the traditional conception. 
The temptation must have been strong to repeat with the 
new science what had been tried on the old, to suppose 
our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, to 
unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as the 
Greeks had already done, the name of metaphysics. So, 
beside the new way that philosophy might have prepared, 
the old remained open, that indeed which physics trod. 
And, as physics retained of time only what could as well be 
spread out all at once in space, the metaphysics that chose 
the same direction had necessarily to proceed as if time 
created and annihilated nothing, as if duration had no 
efficacy. Bound, like the physics of the moderns and the 
metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical 
method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted 
at the start and immanent in the method itself: All is 
given. 

That metaphysics hesitated at first between the two paths 
seems to us unquestionable. The indecision is visible in 
Cartesianism. On the one hand, Descartes affirms uni- 
versal mechanism: from this point of view movement 
would be relative, 1 and, as time has just as much reality 
as movement, it would follow that past, present and future 
are given from all eternity. But, on the other hand (and 
that is why the philosopher has not gone to these extreme 
consequences), Descartes believes in the free will of man. 
He superposes on the determinism of physical phenomena 
the indeterminism of human actions, and, consequently, on 
time-length a time in which there is invention, creation, 
true succession. This duration he supports on a God 
who is unceasingly renewing the creative act, and who, 
being thus tangent to time and becoming, sustains them, 
communicates to them necessarily something of his absolute 
1 Descartes, Principes, ii. § 29. 



346 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap 

reality. When he places himself at this second point of 
view, Descartes speaks of movement, even spatial, as of an 
absolute. 1 

He therefore entered both roads one after the other, hav- 
ing resolved to follow neither of them to the end. The 
first would have led him to the denial of free will in man 
and of real will in God. It was the suppression of all 
efficient duration, the likening of the universe to a thing 
given, which a superhuman intelligence would embrace 
at once in a moment or in eternity. In following the second, 
on the contrary, he would have been led to all the conse- 
quences which the intuition of true duration implies. Cre- 
ation would have appeared not simply as continued, but 
also as continuous. The universe, regarded as a whole, 
would really evolve. The future would no longer be deter- 
minable by the present; at most we might say that, once 
realized, it can be found again in its antecedents, as the 
sounds of a new language can be expressed with the letters, 
of an old alphabet if we agree to enlarge the value of the 
letters and to attribute to them, retro-actively, sounds 
which no combination of the old sounds could have pro- 
duced beforehand. Finally, the mechanistic explanation 
might have remained universal in this, that it can indeed 
be extended to as many systems as we choose to cut out 
in the continuity of the universe; but mechanism would 
then have become a method rather than a doctrine. It 
would have expressed the fact that science must proceed 
after the cinematographical manner, that the function of 
science is to scan the rhythm of the flow of things and not 
to fit itself into that flow.— Such were the two opposite con- 
ceptions of metaphysics which were offered to philosophy. 

It chose the first. The reason of this choice is undoubt- 
edly the mind's tendency to follow the cinematographical 

Descartes, Principes, ii. §§ 36 ff. 



rr.j SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 347 

method, a method so natural to our intellect, and so well 
adjusted also to the requirements of our science, that we 
must feel doubly sure of its speculative impotence to re- 
nounce it in metaphysics. But ancient philosophy also 
influenced the choice. Artists for ever admirable, the 
Greeks created a type of suprasensible truth, as of sensible 
beauty, whose attraction is hard to resist. As soon as we 
incline to make metaphysics a systematization of science, 
we glide in the direction of Plato and of Aristotle. And, 
once in the zone of attraction in which the Greek philoso- 
phers moved, we are drawn along in their orbit. 

Such was the case with Leibniz, as also with Spinoza. 
We are not blind to the treasures of originality their doc- 
trines contain. Spinoza and Leibniz have poured into 
them the whole content of their souls, rich with the in- 
ventions of their genius and the acquisitions of modern 
thought. And there are in each of them, especially in 
Spinoza, flashes of intuition that break through the system. 
But if we leave out of the two doctrines what breathes life 
into them, if we retain the skeleton only, we have before 
us the very picture of Platonism and Aristotelianism seen 
through Cartesian mechanism. They present to us a 
systematization of the new physics, constructed on the 
model of the ancient metaphysics. 

What, indeed, could the unification of physics be? The 
inspiring idea of that science was to isolate, within the uni- 
verse, systems of material points such that, the position 
of each of these points being known at a given moment, 
we could then calculate it for any moment whatever. As, 
moreover, the systems thus defined were the only ones on 
which the new science had hold, and as it could not be 
known beforehand whether a system satisfied or did not 
satisfy the desired condition, it was useful to proceed always 
and everywhere as if the condition was realized. There 



348 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

was in this a methodological rule, a very natural rule — 
so natural, indeed, that it was not even necessary to formu- 
late it. For simple common sense tells us that when we 
are possessed of an effective instrument of research, and 
are ignorant of the limits of its applicability, we should 
act as if its applicability were unlimited; there will always 
be time to abate it. But the temptation must have been 
great for the philosopher to hypostatize this hope, or rather 
this impetus, of the new science, and to convert a general 
rule of method into a fundamental law of things. So he 
transported himself at once to the limit ; he supposed physics 
to have become complete and to embrace the whole of the 
sensible world. The universe became a system of points, 
the position of which was rigorously determined at each 
instant by relation to the preceding instant and theoretically 
calculable for any moment whatever. The result, in short, 
was universal^mechanism. But it was not enough to 
formulate this mechanism; what was required was to 
found it, to give the reason for it and prove its necessity. 
And the essential affirmation of mechanism being that of a 
reciprocal-mathematical- dependence— of all the points of 
the universe, as also of all the moments of the universe, 
the reason of mechanism had to be discovered in the junity 
of a ^principle into which could be contracted all that is 
juxtaposed in space and successive in time. Hence, the 
whole of the real was supposed to be given at once. The 
reciprocal determination of the juxtaposed appearances in 
space was explained by the indivisibility of true being, and 
the inflexible determinism of successive phenomena in time 
simply expressed that the whole of being is given in the 
eternal. 

The new philosophy was going, then, to be a recommence- 
ment, or rather a transposition, of the old. The ancient 
philosophy had taken each of the concepts into which a 



iv.j SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 349 

becoming is concentrated or which mark its apogee: it 
supposed them all known, and gathered them up into a 
single concept, form of forms, idea of ideas, like the God 
of Aristotle. The new philosophy was going to take each 
of the laws which condition a becoming in relation to others 
and which are as the permanent substratum of phenomena : 
it would suppose them all known, and would gather them 
up into a unity which also would express them eminently, 
but which, like the God of Aristotle and for the same 
reasons, must remain immutably shut up in itself. 

True, this return to the ancient philosophy was not with- 
out great difficulties. When a Plato, an Aristotle, or a 
Plotinus melt all the concepts of their science into a single 
one, in so doing they embrace the whole of the real, for 
concepts are supposed to represent the things themselves, 
and to possess at least as much positive content. But a 
law, in general, expresses only a relation, and physical 
laws in particular express only quantitative relations be- 
tween concrete things. So that if a modern philosopher 
works with the laws of the new science as the Greek philoso- 
pher did with the concepts of the ancient science, if he makes 
all the conclusions of a physics supposed omniscient con- 
verge on a single point, he neglects what is concrete in the 
phenomena — the qualities perceived, the perceptions them- 
selves. His synthesis comprises, it seems, only a fraction 
of reality. In fact, the first result of the new science was 
to cut the real into two halves, quantity and quality, the 
former being credited to the account of bodies and the latter 
to the account of souls. The ancients had raised no such 
barriers either between quality and quantity or between 
soul and body. For them, the mathematical concepts 
were concepts like the others, related to the others and 
fitting quite naturally into the hierarchy of the Ideas. 
Neither was the body then defined by geometrical extension, 



350 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 

nor the soul by consciousness. If the 4>ox^ of Aristotle, 
the entelechy of a living body, is less spiritual than our 
"soul," it is because his o&fia, already impregnated with the 
Idea, is less corporeal than our "body." The scission was 
not yet irremediable between the two terms. It has be- 
come so, and thence a metaphysic that aims at an abstract 
unity must resign itself either to comprehend in its synthe- 
sis only one half of the real, or to take advantage of the 
absolute heterogeneity of the two halves in order to con- 
sider one as a translation of the other. Different phrases 
will express different things if they belong to the same 
language, that is to say, if there is a certain relationship 
of sound between them. But if they belong to two different 
languages, they might, just because of their radical di- 
versity of sound, express the same thing. So of quality 
and quantity, of soul and body. It is for having cut all 
connection between the two terms that philosophers have 
been led to establish between them a rigorous parallelism,, 
of which the ancients had not dreamed, to regard them as 
translations and not as inversions of each other; in short, 
to posit a fundamental identity as a substratum to their 
duality. The synthesis to which they rose thus became 
capable of embracing everything. A divine mechanism 
made the phenomena of thought to correspond to those of 
extension, each to each, qualities to quantities, souls to 
bodies. 

It is this parallelism that we find both in Leibniz and in 
Spinoza — in different forms, it is true, because of the un- 
equal importance which they attach to extension. With 
Spinoza, the two terms Thought and Extension are placed, 
in principle at least, in the same rank. They are, there- 
fore, two translations of one and the same original, or, as 
Spinoza says, two attributes of one and the same substance, 
which we must call God. And these two translations, 



iv.i SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 351 

as also an infinity of others into languages which we know 
not, are called up and even forced into existence by the 
original, just as the essence of the circle is translated auto- 
matically, so to speak, both by a figure and by an equation. 
For Leibniz, on the contrary, extension is indeed still a 
translation, but it is thought that is the original, and 
thought might dispense with translation, the translation 
being made only for us. In positing God, we necessarily 
posit also all the possible views of God, that is to say, the 
monads. But we can always imagine that a view has been 
taken from a point of view, and it is natural for an imperfect 
mind like ours to class views, qualitatively different, ac- 
cording to the order and position of points of view, quali- 
tatively identical, from which the views might have been 
taken. In reality the points of view do not exist, for there 
are only views, each given in an indivisible block and 
representing in its own way the whole of reality, which is 
God. But we need to express the plurality of the views, 
that are unlike each other, by the multiplicity of the points 
of view that are exterior to each other; and we also need 
to symbolize the more or less close relationship between 
the views by the relative situation of the points of view to 
one another, their nearness or their distance, that is to say, 
by a magnitude. That is what Leibniz means when he 
says that space is the order of coexistents, that the per- 
ception of extension is a confused perception (that is to say, 
a perception relative to an imperfect mind), and that 
nothing exists but monads, expressing thereby that the 
real Whole has no parts, but is repeated to infinity, each 
time integrally (though diversely) within itself, and that 
all these repetitions are complementary to each other. 
In just the same way, the visible relief of an object is equiva- 
lent to the whole set of stereoscopic views taken of it from 
all points, so that, instead of seeing in the relief a juxta- 



352 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

position of solid parts, we might quite as well look upon it 
as made of the reciprocal complementarity of these whole 
views, each given in block, each indivisible, each different 
from all the others and yet representative of the same thing. 
The Whole, that is to say, God, is this very relief for Leibniz, 
and the monads are these complementary plane views; 
for that reason he defines God as "the substance that has 
no point of view," or, again, as "the universal harmony," 
that is to say, the reciprocal complementarity of monads. 
In short, Leibniz differs from Spinoza in this, that he looks 
upon the universal mechanism as an aspect which reality 
takes for us, whereas, Spinoza makes of it an aspect which 
reality takes for itself. 

It is true that, after having concentrated in God the 
whole of the real, it became difficult for them to pass from 
God to things, from eternity to time. The difficulty was 
even much greater for these philosophers than an Aristotle 
or a Plotinus. The God of Aristotle, indeed, had been 
obtained by the compression and reciprocal compene- 
tration of the Ideas that represent, in their finished state 
or in their culminating point, the changing things of the 
world. He was, therefore, transcendent to the world, 
and the duration of things was juxtaposed to His eternity, 
of which it was only a weakening. But in the principle 
to which we are led by the consideration of universal 
mechanism, and which must serve as its substratum, it 
is not concepts or things, but' laws or relations that are 
condensed. Now, a relation does not exist separately. 
A law connects changing terms and is immanent in what 
it governs. The principle in which all these relations 
are ultimately summed up, and which is the basis of the 
unity of nature, cannot, therefore, be transcendent to 
sensible reality; it is immanent in it, and we must suppose 
that it is at once both in and out of time, gathered up in the 






iv.j SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 353 

unity of its substance and yet condemned to wind it off in 
an endless chain. Rather than formulate so appalling a 
contradiction, the philosophers were necessarily led to 
sacrifice the weaker of the two terms, and to regard the 
temporal aspect of things as a mere illusion. Leibniz says 
so in explicit terms, for he makes of time, as of space, a 
confused perception. While the multiplicity of his monads 
expresses only the diversity of views taken of the whole, 
the history of an isolated monad seems to be hardly any- 
thing else than the manifold views that it can take of its 
own substance: so that time would consist in all the points 
of view that each monad can assume towards itself, as 
space consists in all the points of view that all monads 
can assume towards God. But the thought of Spinoza 
is much less clear, and this philosopher seems to have sought 
to establish, between eternity and that which has duration, 
the same difference as Aristotle made between essence and 
accidents r a most difficult undertaking, for the ukq of 
Aristotle was no longer there to measure the distance and 
explain the passage from the essential to the accidental, 
Descartes having eliminated it for ever. However that 
may be, the deeper we go into the Spinozistic conception 
of the "inadequate," as related to the "adequate," the 
more we feel ourselves moving in the direction of Aristote- 
lianism — just as the Leibnizian monads, in proportion as 
they mark themselves out the more clearly, tend to ap- 
proximate to the Intelligibles of Plotinus. 1 The natural 
trend of these two philosophies brings them back to the 
conclusions of the ancient philosophy. 

To sum up, the resemblances of this new metaphysic 
to that of the ancients arise from the fact that both suppose 

1 In a course of lectures on Plotinus, given at the College de France in 
1897-1898, we tried to bring out these resemblances. They are numerous 
and impressive. The analogy is continued even in the formulae em- 
ployed on each side. 



354 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

ready-made — the former above the sensible, the latter 
within the sensible — a science one and complete, with 
which any reality that the sensible may contain is believed 
to coincide. For both, reality as well as truth are integrally 
given in eternity. Both are opposed to the idea of a reality 
that creates itself gradually, that is, at bottom, to an ab- 
solute duration. 

Now, it might easily be shown that the conclusions of 
this metaphysic, springing from science, have rebounded 
upon science itself, as it were, by ricochet. They penetrate 
the whole of our so-called empiricism. Physics and chem- 
istry study only inert matter; biology, when it treats the 
living being physically and chemically, considers only 
the inert side of the living: hence the mechanistic expla- 
nations, in spite of their development, include only a small 
part of the real. To suppose a priori that the whole of 
the real is resolvable into elements of this kind, or at least 
that mechanism can give a complete translation of what 
happens in the ^vorld, is to pronounce for a certain meta- 
physic — the very metaphysic of which Spinoza and Leib- 
niz have laid down the principles and drawn the conse- 
quences. Certainly, the psycho-physiologist who affirms 
the exact equivalence of the cerebral and the psychical 
state, who imagines the possibility, for some superhuman 
intellect, of reading in the brain what is going on in con- 
sciousness, believes himself very far from the metaphysi- 
cians of the seventeenth century, and very near to experi- 
ence. Yet experience pure and simple tells us nothing of the 
kind. It shows us the interdependence of the mental and 
the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum 
for the psychical state — nothing more. From the fact 
that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow 
that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw is 



iv.] PARALLELISM AND MONISM 355 

necessary to a certain machine, because the machine works 
when the screw is there and stops when the screw is taken 
away, we do not say that the screw is the equivalent of 
the machine. For correspondence to be equivalence, 
it would be necessary that to any part of the machine a 
definite part of the screw should correspond — as in a literal 
translation in which each chapter renders a chapter, each 
sentence a sentence, each word a word. Now, the re- 
lation of the brain to consciousness seems to be entirely 
different. Not only does the hypothesis of an equivalence 
between the psychical state and the cerebral state imply a 
downright absurdity, as we have tried to prove in a former 
essay, 1 but the facts, examined without prejudice, cer- 
tainly seem to indicate that the relation of the psychical 
to the physical is just that of the machine to the screw. 
To speak of an equivalence between the two is simply 
to curtail, and make almost unintelligible, the Spinozis- 
tic or Leibnizian metaphysic. It is to accept this philos- 
ophy, such as it is, on the side of Extension, but to mutilate 
it on the side of Thought. With Spinoza, with Leibniz, 
we suppose the unifying synthesis of the phenomena of 
matter achieved, and everything in matter explained 
mechanically. But, for the conscious facts, we no longer 
push the synthesis to the end. We stop half-way. We 
suppose consciousness to be coextensive with a certain 
part of nature and not with all of it. We are thus led, 
sometimes to an " epiphenomenalism" that associates 
consciousness with certain particular vibrations and puts 
it here and there in the world in a sporadic state, and some- 
times to a "monism" that scatters consciousness into as 
many tiny grains as there are atoms; but, in either case, 
it is to an incomplete Spinozism or to an incomplete Leib- 

^'Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique" (Revue de metaphysique et 
de morale, Nov. 1904, pp. 895-908). Cf . Matiere et memoire, Paris, 1896, 
chap. i. 



356 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

nizianism that we come back. Between this conception 
of nature and Cartesianism we find, moreover, intermediate 
historical stages. The medical philosophers of the eight- 
eenth century, with their cramped Cartesianism, have had a 
great part in the genesis of the " epiphenomenalism" and 
"monism" of the present day. 

These doctrines are thus found to fall short of the Kantian 
criticism. Certainly, the philosophy of Kant is also im- 
bued with the belief in a science single and complete, em- 
bracing the whole of the real. Indeed, looked at from one 
aspect, it is only a continuation of the metaphysics of the 
moderns and a transposition of the ancient metaphysics. 
Spinoza and Leibniz had, following Aristotle, hypostatized 
in God the unity of knowledge. The Kantian criticism, 
on one side at least, consists in asking whether the whole 
of this hypothesis is necessary to modern science as it was 
to ancient science, or if part of the hypothesis is not suf- 
ficient. For the ancients, science applied to concepts, 
that is to say, to kinds of things. In compressing all con- 
cepts into one, they therefore necessarily arrived at a 
being, which we may call Thought, but which was rather 
thought-object than thought-subject. When Aristotle 
defined God the voyaeajs vorjacs, it is probably on votfoeajs, 
and not on votjocs that he put the emphasis. God was 
the synthesis of all concepts, the idea of ideas. But 
modern science turns on laws, that is, on relations. Now, 
a relation is a bond established by a mind between two 
or more terms. A relation is nothing outside of the in- 
tellect that relates. The universe, therefore, can only 
be a system of laws if phenomena have passed beforehand 
through the filter of an intellect. Of course, this intellect 
might be that of a being infinitely superior to man, who 
would found the materiality of things at the same time that 



iv.i THE KANTIAN CRITICISM 357 

he bound them together: such was the hypothesis of Leib- 
niz and of Spinoza. But it is not necessary to go so far, 
and, for the effect we have here to obtain, the human 
intellect is enough: such is precisely the Kantian solution. 
Between the dogmatism of a Spinoza or a Leibniz and the 
criticism of Kant there is just the same distance as between 
"it may be maintained that — " and "it suffices that — ." 
Kant stops this dogmatism on the incline that was making 
it slip too far toward the Greek metaphysics; he reduces 
to the strict minimum the hypothesis which is necessary 
in order to suppose the physics of Galileo indefinitely ex- 
tensible. True, when he speaks of the human intellect, he 
means neither yours nor mine: the unity of nature comes 
indeed from the human understanding that unifies, but 
the unifying function that operates here is impersonal. 
It imparts itself to our individual consciousnesses, but it 
transcends them. It is much less than a substantial God; 
it is, however, a little more than the isolated work of a man 
or even than the collective work of humanity. It does not 
exactly lie within man; rather, man lies within it, as in 
an atmosphere of intellectuality which his consciousness 
breathes. It is, if we will, a formal God, something that 
in Kant is not yet divine, but which tends to become so. 
It became so, indeed, with Fichte. With Kant, however, 
its principal role was to give to the whole of our science 
a relative and human character, although of a humanity 
already somewhat deified. From this point of view, the 
criticism of Kant consisted chiefly in limiting the dog- 
matism of his predecessors, accepting their conception 
of science and reducing to a minimum the metaphysic 
it implied. 

But it is otherwise with the Kantian distinction between 
the matter of knowledge and its form. By regarding in- 
telligence as pre-eminently a faculty of establishing re- 



358 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

lations, Kant attributed an extra-intellectual origin to the 
terms between which the relations are established. He 
affirmed, against his immediate predecessors, that know- 
ledge is not entirely resolvable into terms of intelligence. 
He brought back into philosophy — while modifying it 
and carrying it on to another plane — that essential element 
of the philosophy of Descartes which had been abandoned 
by the Cartesians. 

Thereby he prepared the way for a new philosophy, 
which might have established itself in the extra-intellectual 
matter of knowledge by a higher effort of intuition. Co- 
inciding with this matter, adopting the same rhythm and 
the same movement, might not consciousness, by two 
efforts of opposite direction, raising itself and lowering 
itself by turns, become able to grasp from within, and no 
longer perceive only from without, the two forms of reality, 
body and mind? Would not this twofold effort make us, 
as far as that is possible, re-live the absolute? Moreover, 
as, in the course of this operation, we should see intellect 
spring up of itself, cut itself out in the whole of mind, in- 
tellectual knowledge would then appear as it is, limited, 
but not relative. 

Such was the direction that Kantianism might have 
pointed out to a revivified Cartesianism. But in this 
direction Kant himself did not go. 

He would not, because, while assigning to knowledge 
an extra-intellectual matter, he believed this matter to 
be either co-extensive with intellect or less extensive than 
intellect. Therefore he could not dream of cutting out 
intellect in it, nor, consequently, of tracing the genesis 
of the understanding and its categories. The molds 
of the understanding and the understanding itself had to be 
accepted as they are, already made. Between the matter 
presented to our intellect and this intellect itself there was 



iv.] THE KANTIAN CRITICISM 359 

no relationship. The agreement between the two was due 
to the fact that intellect imposed its form on matter. So 
that not only was it necessary to posit the intellectual 
form of knowledge as a kind of absolute and give up the 
quest of its genesis, but the very matter of this knowledge 
seemed too ground down by the intellect for us to be able 
to hope to get it back in its original purity. It was not 
the "thing-in-itself," it was only the refraction of it through 
our atmosphere. 

If now we inquire why Kant did not believe that the 
matter of our knowledge extends beyond its form, this is 
what we find. The criticism of our knowledge of nature 
that was instituted by Kant consisted in ascertaining what 
our mind must be and what Nature must be if the claims 
of our science are justified; but of these claims themselves 
Kant has not made the criticism. I mean that he took for 
granted the idea of a science that is one, capable of bind- 
ing with the same force all the parts of what is given, and 
of co-ordinating them into a system presenting on all sides 
an equal solidity. He did not consider, in his Critique 
of Pure Reason, that science became less and less objective, 
more and more symbolical, to the extent that it went 
from the physical to the vital, from the vital to the psychical. 
Experience does not move, to his view, in two different 
and perhaps opposite ways, the one conformable to the 
direction of the intellect, the other contrary to it. There 
is, for him, only one experience, and the intellect covers 
its whole ground. This is what Kant expresses by saying 
that all our intuitions are sensuous, or, in other words, 
infra-intellectual. And this would have to be admitted, 
indeed, if our science presented in all its parts an equal 
objectivity. But suppose, on the contrary, that science 
is less and less objective, more and more symbolical, as it 
goes from the physical to the psychical, passing through 



360 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

the vital: then, as it is indeed necessary to perceive a 
thing somehow in order to symbolize it, there would be an 
intuition of the psychical, and more generally of the vital, 
which the intellect would transpose and translate, no 
doubt, but which would none the less transcend the in- 
tellect. There would be, in other words, a supra-intel- 
lectual intuition. If this intuition exist, a taking possession 
of the spirit by itself is possible, and no longer only a know- 
ledge that is external and phenomenal. What is more, 
if we have an intuition of this kind (I mean an ultra-in- 
tellectual intuition) then sensuous intuition is likely to 
be in continuity with it through certain intermediaries, 
as the infra-red is continuous with the ultra-violet. Sen- 
suous intuition itself, therefore, is promoted. It will 
no longer attain only the phantom of an unattainable 
thing-in-itself. It is (provided we bring to it certain 
indispensable corrections) into the absolute itself that it 
will introduce us. So long as it was regarded as the only 
material of our science, it reflected back on all science 
something of the relativity which strikes a scientific know- 
ledge of spirit ; and thus the perception of bodies, which is 
the beginning of the science of bodies, seemed itself to 
be relative. Relative, therefore, seemed to be sensuous 
intuition. But this is not the case if distinctions are made 
between the different sciences, and if the scientific knowledge 
of the spiritual (and also, consequently, of the vital) be 
regarded as the more or less artificial extension of a certain 
manner of knowing which, applied to bodies, is not at all 
symbolical. Let us go further: if there are thus two in- 
tuitions of different order (the second being obtained by a 
reversal of the direction of the first), and if it is toward the 
second that the intellect naturally inclines, there is no 
essential difference between the intellect and this intuition 
itself. The barriers between the matter of sensible know- 



iv.i THE KANTIAN CRITICISM 361 

ledge and its form are lowered, as also between the "pure 
forms" of sensibility and the categories of the understand- 
ing. The matter and form of intellectual knowledge 
(restricted to its own object) are seen to be engendering 
each other by a reciprocal adaptation, intellect modeling 
itself on corporeity, and corporeity on intellect. 

But this duality of intuition Kant neither would nor 
could admit. It would have been necessary, in order to ad- 
mit it, to regard duration as the very stuff of reality, and 
consequently to distinguish between the substantial du- 
ration of things and time spread out in space. It would 
have been necessary to regard space itself, and the geometry 
which is immanent in space, as an ideal limit in the direction 
of which material things develop, but which they do not 
actually attain. Nothing could be more contrary to the 
letter, and perhaps also to the spirit, of the Critique of 
Pure Reason. No doubt, knowledge is presented to us in 
it as an ever-open roll, experience as a push of facts that 
is for ever going on. But, according to Kant, these facts 
are spread out on one plane as fast as they arise; they are 
external to each other and external to the mind. Of a 
knowledge from within, that could grasp them in their 
springing forth instead of taking them already sprung, 
that would dig beneath space and spatialized time, there 
is never any question. Yet it is indeed beneath this plane 
that our consciousness places us ; there flows true duration. 

In this respect, also, Kant is very near his predecessors. 
Between the non-temporal, and the time that is spread 
out in distinct moments, he admits no mean. And as 
there is indeed no intuition that carries us into the non- 
temporal, all intuition is thus found to be sensuous, by 
definition. But between physical existence, which is 
spread out in space, and non-temporal existence, which 
can only be a conceptual and logical existence like that 



362 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

of which metaphysical dogmatism speaks, is there not 
room for consciousness and for life? There is, unquestion- 
ably. We perceive it when we place ourselves in duration 
in order to go from that duration to moments, instead of 
starting from moments in order to bind them again and 
to construct duration. 

Yet it was to a non-temporal intuition that the immediate 
successors of Kant turned, in order to escape from the 
Kantian relativism. Certainly, the ideas of becoming, 
of progress, of evolution, seem to occupy a large place in 
their philosophy. But does duration really play a part 
in it? Ileal duration is that in which each form flows out 
of previous forms, while adding to them something new, 
and is explained by them as much as it explains them; 
but to deduce this form directly from one complete Being 
which it is supposed to manifest, is to return to Spinozism. 
It is, like Leibniz and Spinoza, to deny to duration all 
efficient action. The post-Kantian philosophy, severe 
as it may have been on the mechanistic theories, accepts 
from mechanism the idea of a science that is one and the 
same for all kinds of reality. And it is nearer to mechanism 
than it imagines ; for though, in the consideration of matter, 
of life and of thought, it replaces the successive degrees 
of complexity, that mechanism supposed by degrees of the 
realization of an Idea or by degrees of the object ification 
of a Will, it still speaks of degrees, and these degrees are 
those of a scale which Being traverses in a single direction. 
In short, it makes out the same articulations in nature that 
mechanism does. Of mechanism it retains the whole 
design; it merely gives it a different coloring. But it 
is the design itself, or at least one half of the design, that 
needs to be re-made. 

If we are to do that, we must give up the method of 
construction, which was that of Kant's successors. We 



iv.j THE KANTIAN CRITICISM 363 

must appeal to experience — an experience purified, or, 
in other words, released, where necessary, from the molds 
that our intellect has formed in the degree and proportion 
of the progress of our action on things. An experience 
of this kind is not a non-temporal experience. It only 
seeks, beyond the spatialized time in which we believe 
we see continual rearrangements between the parts, that 
concrete duration in which a radical recasting of the whole 
is always going on. It follows the real in all its sinuosities. 
It does not lead us, like the method of construction, to 
higher and higher generalities — piled-up stories of a mag- 
nificent building. But then it leaves no play between the 
explanations it suggests and the objects it has to explain. 
It is the detail of the real, and no longer only the whole 
in a lump, that it claims to illumine. 

That the thought of the nineteenth century called for a 
philosophy of this kind, rescued from the arbitrary, capable 
of coming down to the detail of particular facts, is un- 
questionable. Unquestionably, also, it felt that this 
philosophy ought to establish itself in what we call con- 
crete duration. The advent of the moral sciences, the 
progress of psychology, the growing importance of embry- 
ology among the biological sciences — all this was bound 
to suggest the idea of a reality which endures inwardly, 
which is duration itself. So, when a philosopher arose who 
announced a doctrine of evolution, in which the progress 
of matter toward perceptibility would be traced together 
with the advance of the mind toward rationality, in which 
the complication of correspondences between the external 
and the internal would be followed step by step, in which 
change would become the very substance of things — to 
him all eyes were turned. The powerful attraction that 
Spencerian evolutionism has exercised on contemporary 



364 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

thought is due to that very cause. However far Spencer 
may seem to be from Kant, however ignorant, indeed, he 
may have been of Kantianism, he felt, nevertheless, at 
his first contact with the biological sciences, the direction 
in which philosophy could continue to advance without 
laying itself open to the Kantian criticism. 

But he had no sooner started to follow the path than he 
turned off short. He had promised to retrace a genesis, 
and, lo! he was doing something entirely different. His 
doctrine bore indeed the name of evolutionism; it claimed 
to remount and redescend the course of the universal 
becoming; but, in fact, it dealt neither with becoming 
nor with evolution. 

We need not enter here into a profound examination of 
this philosophy. Let us say merely that the usual device of the 
Spencerian method consists in reconstructing evolution with 
fragments of the evolved. If I paste a picture on a card and 
then cut up the card into bits, I can reproduce the picture 
by rightly grouping again the small pieces. And a child 
who working thus with the pieces of a puzzle-picture, and 
putting together unformed fragments of the picture finally 
obtains a pretty colored design, no doubt imagines that he 
has produced design and color. Yet the act of drawing 
and painting has nothing to do with that of putting to- 
gether the fragments of a picture already drawn and al- 
ready painted. So, by combining together the most simple 
results of evolution, you may imitate well or ill the most 
complex effects; but of neither the simple nor the complex 
will you have retraced the genesis, and the addition of 
evolved to evolved will bear no resemblance whatever to 
the movement of evolution. 

Such, however, is Spencer's illusion. He takes reality 
in its present form; he breaks it to pieces, he scatters 
it in fragments which he throws to the winds; then he 



iv.] THE EVOLUTIONISM OF SPENCER 365 

"integrates" these fragments and "dissipates their move- 
ment." Having imitated the Whole by a work of mosaic, 
he imagines he has retraced the design of it, and made the 
genesis. 

Is it matter that is in question? The diffused elements 
which he integrates into visible and tangible bodies have 
all the air of being the very particles of the simple bodies, 
which he first supposes disseminated throughout space. 
They are, at any rate, "material points," and consequently 
unvarying points, veritable little solids: as if solidity, 
being what is nearest and handiest to us, could be found 
at the very origin of materiality! The more physics pro- 
gresses, the more it shows the impossibility of representing 
the properties of ether or of electricity — the probable base 
of all bodies — on the model of the properties of the matter 
which we perceive. But philosophy goes back further 
even than the ether, a mere schematic figure of the re- 
lations between phenomena apprehended by our senses. 
It knows indeed that what is visible and tangible in things 
represents our possible action on them. It is not by divid- 
ing the evolved that we shall reach the principle of that 
which evolves. It is not by recomposing the evolved 
with itself that we shall reproduce the evolution of which 
it is the term. 

Is it the question of mind? By compounding the 
reflex with the reflex, Spencer thinks he generates instinct 
and rational volition one after the other. He fails to see 
that the specialized reflex, being a terminal point of evo- 
lution just as much as perfect will, cannot be supposed 
at the start. That the first of the two terms should have 
reached its final form before the other is probable enough ; 
but both the one and the other are deposits of the evolution 
movement, and the evolution movement itself can no more 
be expressed as a function solely of the first than solely 



366 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 

of the second. We must begin by mixing the reflex and 
the voluntary. We must then go in quest of the fluid 
reality which has been precipitated in this twofold form, 
and which probably shares in both without being either. 
At the lowest degree of the animal scale, in living beings 
that are but an undifferentiated protoplasmic mass, the 
reaction to stimulus does not yet call into play one definite 
mechanism, as in the reflex; it has not yet choice among 
several definite mechanisms, as in the voluntary act ; it is, 
then, neither voluntary nor reflex, though it heralds both. 
We experience in ourselves something of this true original 
activity when we perform semi-voluntary and semi-auto- 
matic movements to escape a pressing danger. And yet 
this is but a very imperfect imitation of the primitive char- 
acter, for we are concerned here with a mixture of two 
activities already formed, already localized in a brain 
and in a spinal cord, whereas the original activity was a 
simple thing, which became diversified through the very 
construction of mechanisms like those of the spinal cord 
and brain. But to all this Spencer shuts his eyes, because 
it is of the essence of his method to recompose the con- 
solidated with the consolidated, instead of going back 
to the gradual process of consolidation, which is evolution 
itself. 

Is it, finally, the question of the correspondence between 
mind and matter? Spencer is right in defining the in- 
tellect by this correspondence. He is right in regarding 
it as the end of an evolution. But when he comes to re- 
trace this evolution, again he integrates the evolved with 
the evolved — failing to see that he is thus taking useless 
trouble, and that in positing the slightest fragment of 
the actually evolved he posits the whole — so that it is 
vain for him, then, to pretend to make the genesis of it. 

For, according to him, the phenomena that succeed 



iv.i THE EVOLUTIONISM OF SPENCER 367 

each other in nature project into the human mind images 
which represent them. To the relations between phenom- 
ena, therefore, correspond symmetrically relations between 
the ideas. And the most general laws of nature, in which 
the relations between phenomena are condensed, are thus 
found to have engendered the directing principles of thought, 
into which the relations between ideas have been integrated. 
Nature, therefore, is reflected in mind. The intimate 
structure of our thought corresponds, piece by piece, to 
the very skeleton of things — I admit it willingly; but, in 
order that the human mind may be able to represent re- 
lations between phenomena, there must first be phenomena, 
that is to say, distinct facts, cut out in the continuity of 
becoming. And once we posit this particular mode of 
cutting up such as we perceive it to-day, we posit also the 
intellect such as it is to-day, for it is by relation to it, and 
to it alone, that reality is cut up in this manner. Is it 
probable that mammals and insects notice the same aspects 
of nature, trace in it the same divisions, articulate the whole 
in the same way? And yet the insect, so far as intelligent, 
has already something of our intellect. Each being cuts 
up the material world according to the lines that its action 
must follow: it is these lines of possible action that, by 
intercrossing, mark out the net of experience of which 
each mesh is a fact. No doubt, a town is composed ex- 
clusively of houses, and the streets of the town are only the 
intervals between the houses: so, we may say that nature 
contains only facts, and that, the facts once posited, the 
relations are simply the lines running between the facts. 
But, in a town, it is the gradual portioning of the ground 
into lots "'/hat has determined at once the place of the houses, 
their general shape, and the direction of the streets: to 
this por -ioning we must go back if we wish to understand 
the pari eular mode of subdivision that causes each house 



368 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 

to be where it is, each street to run as it does. Now, the 
cardinal error of Spencer is to take experience already 
allotted as given, whereas the true problem is to know 
how the allotment was worked. I agree that the laws of 
thought are only the integration of relations between 
facts. But, when I posit the facts with the shape they 
have for me to-day, I suppose my faculties of perception 
and intellection such as they are in me to-day; for it is 
they that portion the real into lots, they that cut the facts 
out in the whole of reality. Therefore, instead of saying 
that the relations between facts have generated the laws 
of thought, I can as well claim that it is the form of thought 
that has determined the shape of the facts perceived, and 
consequently their relations among themselves: the two 
ways of expressing oneself are equivalent; they say at 
bottom the same thing. With the second, it is true, we 
give up speaking of evolution. But, with the first, we 
only speak of it, we do not think of it any the more. For 
a true evolutionism would propose to discover by what 
modus vivendi, gradually obtained, the intellect has adopted 
its plan of structure, and matter its mode of subdivision. 
This structure and this subdivision work into each other; 
they are mutually complementary; they must have pro- 
gressed one with the other. And, whether we posit the 
present structure of mind or the present subdivision of 
matter, in either case we remain in the evolved: we are 
told nothing of what evolves, nothing of evolution. 

And yet it is this evolution that we must discover. Al- 
ready, in the field of physics itself, the scientists who are 
pushing the study of their science furthest incline to believe 
that we cannot reason about the parts as we reason about 
the whole; that the same principles are not applicable 
to the origin and to the end of a progress; that neither 
creation nor annihilation, for instance, is inac nissible 



nr.] THE EVOLUTIONISM OF SPENCER 369 

when we are concerned with the constituent corpuscles 
of the atom. Thereby they tend to place themselves 
in the concrete duration, in which alone there is true 
generation and not only a composition of parts. It is 
true that the creation and annihilation of which they speak 
concern the movement or the energy, and not the imponder- 
able medium through which the energy and the movement 
are supposed to circulate. But what can remain of matter 
when you take away everything that determines it, that 
is to say, just energy and movement themselves? The 
philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making 
a clean sweep of everything that is only an imaginative 
symbol, he will see the material world melt back into a 
simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he 
will thus be prepared to discover real duration there where 
it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life and of 
consciousness. For, so far as inert matter is concerned, 
we may neglect the flowing without committing a serious 
error: matter, we have said, is weighted with geometry; 
and matter, the reality which descends, endures only by 
its connection with that which ascends. But life and con- 
sciousness are this very ascension. When once we have 
grasped them in their essence by adopting their movement, 
we understand how the rest of reality is derived from them. 
Evolution appears and, within this evolution, the pro- 
gressive determination of materiality and intellectuality 
by the gradual consolidation of the one and of the other. 
But, then, it is within the evolutionary movement that 
we place ourselves, in order to follow it to its present re- 
sults, instead of recomposing these results artificially with 
fragments of themselves. Such seems to us to be the true 
function of philosophy. So understood, philosophy is 
not only the turning of the mind homeward, the coincidence 
of human consciousness with the living principle whence 



370 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

it emanates, a contact with the creative effort: it is the 
study of becoming in general, it is true evolutionism and 
consequently the true continuation of science — provided 
that we understand by this word a set of truths either 
experienced or demonstrated, and not a certain new 
scholasticism that has grown up during the latter half 
of the nineteenth century around the physics of Galileo, 
as the old scholasticism grew up around Aristotle. 



INDEX 



(Compiled by the Translator) 



Abolition of everything a self- 
contradiction, 280, 283, 296, 
288 
idea of, 279, 282, 283, 295, 296. 
See Nought 
Absence of order, 231, 234, 274. 

See Disorder 
Absolute and freedom, 277 

reality, 99, 228-9, 269, 358, 361 
reality of the person, 269 
time and the, 239, 240, 298, 340, 
344 
Absoluteness of duration, 206 
of understanding, xi, 47, 152, 
190, 197, 199 
Abstract becoming, 304-7 
multiplicity, 257-9 
time, 9, 17, 20-2, 37, 39, 46, 51, 
163, 318-9, 336, 352-3 
Accident and essence in Aris- 
totle's philosophy, 353 
in evolution, 86-7, 104, 114-5, 
127, 169, 170, 252, 254-5, 266, 
267, 326-7 
Accidental variations, 55, 63, 68, 

69, 74, 85-6, 168 
Accumulation of energy, function 
of vegetable organisms, 253, 
255 
Achilles and tortoise, in Zeno, 

311, 312-3 
Acquired characters, inheritance 
of, 76-9, 83-4, 87, 169, 170, 173, 
231 
Act, consciousness as inadequacy 
of, to representation, 144 
form (or essence), quality, 
three classes of representa- 
tion, 302-3 
Action, creativeness of free, 192, 
247 
and concepts, 160, 297 
and consciousness, xiii, 5, 143- 

4, 145, 179-80, 207, 262 
discontinuity of, 154, 307 
freedom of, in animals, 130 
as function of nervous system, 
262-3 



Action (Continued) 
indivisibility of, 94, 95, 308-9 
and inert matter, 96, 136, 141-2, 

156, 187, 198, 226, 366 
instinct and, 136, 141 
instrument of, consciousness, 

180 
instrument of, life, 162 
instrument of matter, 161, 198-9 
as instrument of consciousness, 

180 
and intellect. See Intellect and 

action 
intensity of consciousness varies 

with ratio of possible, to 

real, 145 
meaning of, 301-3 
moves from want to fulness, 

297, 298 
organism a machine for, 252, 

254, 300 
and perception, 5, 11, 12, 93, 

188, 189, 206, 227-30, 300, 307, 

368 
possible, 12, 13, 96, 144, 145, 

146-7, 159, 165, 179-81, 188, 

264 
and science, 93, 195-6, 198-9, 

329-30 
and space, 203 
sphere of the intellect, 155 
tension in a free, 200, 207, 238, 

240, 301-2 
Activity, dissatisfaction the start- 
ing-point of, 297 
of instinct, continuous with 

vital process, 139, 140 
life as, 128-9, 247 
mutually inverse factors in 

vital, 248 
and nervous system, 110, 130, 

132-3, 134-5, 180, 252, 261-3 
organism as, 174 
potential. See Action, possible 
tension of free, 200, 202, 207-8, 

223-4, 237, 239, 300-1 
and torpor in evolution, 109, 

111, 113, 114, 119-20, 129-30, 



372 



INDEX 



Activity, (Continued) 
135-6, 181, 292 
vital, has evolved divergently, 
134 

See Divergent lines of evolu- 
tion 

Adaptation, 50-1, 55, 57-8, 59, 70, 
101, 129, 133, 192, 255, 270, 
305-6 
and causation, 102 
mutual, between materiality 
and intellectuality, 187, 206-7 
and progress, 101-2 

Adequate and inadequate in 
Spinoza, 353 

Adjectives, substantives and 
verbs, 303-4, 315 

Aesthetics and philosophy, 177 

Affection, Role of, in the idea of 
chance, 234 
in the idea of nought, 281-3, 

289, 293, 295, 296 
in negation, 286-7 

Affirmation and negation, 285-6, 
293 

Age and individuality, 15-6 

Albuminoid substances, 121-2 

Alciope, 96 

Alexandrian philosophy, 322, 323 

Algae in illustration of probable 
consciousness in vegetable 
forms, 112 

Alimentation, 113-4, 117, 247 

Allegory of the Cave, 191 

Alternations of increase and de- 
crease of mutability of the 
universe, 245-6 

Alveolar froth, 33-4 

Ambiguity of the idea of "gen- 
erality" in philosophy, 230-1, 
320-1 
of primitive organisms, 99, 112, 
113, 129-30 

Ammophila hirsuta, paralyzing 
instinct in, 173 

Amoeba, in illustration of imita- 
tion of the living by the un- 
organized, 33-6 
in illustration of the ambiguity 

of primitive organisms, 99 
in illustration of the mobility 
characteristic of animals, 108 
in illustration of the "explo- 
sive" expenditure of energy 
characteristic of animals, 
120, 253 

Anagenesis, 34 

Anarchy, Idea of, 233, 234. See 
Disorder 



Anatomy, comparative, and 

transformism, 25 
Ancient philosophy, Achilles and 
tortoise, 311-2 

Alexandrian philosophy, 322-3 

Allegory of the Cave, 191 

Anima (De), 322 note 

Apogee of sensible object, 344, 
345, 349 

Archimedes, 343-4 

Aristotle, 135, 174-5, 227-8, 314. 
316, 321, 323, 324, 328-33, 347, 
349, 353, 356, 370 

Arrow of Zeno, 308-13 

ascent toward God, in Aris- 
totle, 323 

Astronomy, ancient and mod- 
ern, 334-6 

attraction and impulsion in, 
323-4 

becoming in, 313-4, 317 

bow and indivisibility of mo- 
tion, 308-9 

Caelo (De), of Aristotle, 322 
note, 324 nofe 

and Cartesian geometry, 334-5 

causality in, 323, 325-6 

change in, 313-4, 317, 328-9, 342- 
3 

cinematographical nature of. 
315 

circularity of God's thought, 
323-4 

concentric spheres, 328 

concepts, 326-7, 356 

"conversion" and "procession" 
in, 323 

degradation of ideas into sensi- 
ble flux, 317-8, 321, 323-4, 327, 
328, 343-5, 352-3 

degrees of reality, 323-4, 327 

diminution, derivation of be- 
coming by. See Degradation 
of Ideas, etc. 

duration, 317-9 note, 323-4, 327- 
9 

Eleatic philosophy, 308, 314 

Bnneads of Plotinus, 210 note 

essence and accident, 354 

essence or form, 314-5 

eternal, 317-8, 324-6 

Eternity, 317-8, 320, 324, 328 
9 

extension, 210 note, 318, 324, 
327 

form or idea, 314-20, 322, 327, 
329-31, 352 

geometry, Cartesian, and an- 
cient philosophy, 334 



INDEX 



373 



Ancient Philosophy, (Continued) 

God of Aristotle, 196-7, 322-4, 
349, 352, 356 

1&7), 353 

Idea, 314-22, 352-3 

and indivisibility of motion, 
307-8, 311 

intelligible reality in, 326 

intelligibles of Plotinus, 353 

Adfos, of Plotinus, 210 note 

matter in Aristotle's philoso- 
phy, 316, 327 

and modern astronomy, 333-4, 
335 

and modern geometry, 333-4 

and modern philosophy, 226-7, 
228-9, 232, 281-2, 344-5, 346, 
349-51, 364, 369 

and modern science, 329-30, 
336, 342-3, 344-5, 357 

motion in, 307-8, 312-3 

necessity in, 327 

VOyoeCDS VGTjOCS, 356 

non-being, 316, 327 

VOUS 7Z0C1)ZtK.6s, 322 

oscillation about being, sensible 
reality as, 317-8 
Physics of Aristotle, 227-8 note, 
324 note, 330-1 

Plato, 48, 156, 191, 210 note, 
316-8, 321-4, 327, 330, 348, 349 
Plotinus, 210, 316, 323, 326 note, 
349, 352-4 

procession in Alexandrian phi- 
losophy, 323 

<J)vyfi, 210 note, 350 

realism in, 232 

refraction of idea through mat- 
ter or non-being, 317 
sectioning of becoming, 318-9 

sensible reality, 314, 316-8, 321, 
327-9, 352-3 

acUfxa, 350 

space and time, 317-9, 320 

Timaeus, 318 note 

time in ancient and in modern 

science, 330-1, 336-7, 341-4 
time and space, 317-9, 320 
vision of God in Alexandrian 

philosophy, 322 
Zeno, 308, 313 
Ancient science and modern, 329- 

31, 336-7, 342-5, 357 
Anima (De), of Aristotle, 322 

note 
Animal kingdom, 12, 105-6, 119- 



21, 126, 129, 131-2, 134-6, 137- 
8, 139, 179, 184-5 
Animals, 105-47, 167, 170, 181, 183, 
187, 212, 214, 246, 252, 253, 
254, 262-5, 267, 271, 293, 301 
deduction in, 212 
induction in, 214 
and man, 139-43, 183, 187, 188, 

212, 263, 264, 267 
and man in respect to brain, 

183, 184-5, 263-5 
and man in respect to con- 
sciousness, 139-43, 180, 183, 
187, 188, 192, 212, 263-8 
and man in respect to instru- 
ments of action, 139-43, 150-1 
and man in respect to intelli- 
gence, 137-8, 187, 188, 191-2, 
212 
and plants, 105-39, 124-6, 143, 
145, 146-7, 168-70, 181-2, 253, 
254, 293, 
and plants in respect to activ- 
ity of consciousness, 109, 111, 
113, 119-21, 128-9, 132, 134- 
6, 142-3, 144, 181-2, 293 
and plants in respect to func- 
tion, 117-8, 121-2, 127 
and plants in respect to in- 
stinct, 167, 170 
and plants in respect to mobil- 
ity, 109, 110, 113, 129-30, 132- 
3, 135, 181 
and plants in respect to nature 
of consciousness, 134-5 
Antagonistic currents of the vital 
impetus, 129, 135-6, 181, 184, 
250, 258-9 
Anthophora, 146-7 
Antinomies of Kant, 204, 205 
Antipathy. See Sympathy, Feel- 
ing, Divination 
Antithesis and thesis, 205 
Ants, 101, 134, 140, 157 
Ape's brain and consciousness 

contrasted with man's, 263 
Aphasia, 181 
Apidae, social instinct in the, 

171 
Apogee of instinct in the hymen - 
optera and of intelligence in 
man, 174-5 See Evolution- 
ary superiority 
Apogee of sensible object, in 
philosophy of Ideas, 343-4, 
349 
Approximateness of the know- 
ledge of matter, 206-7 
Approximation, in matter, to the 



374 



INDEX 



mathematical order, 218. See 
Order 
Archimedes, 333-4 
Aristotle. See Ancient Philoso- 
phy, Aristotle 
Arrow, Flying, of Zeno, 308-9, 

310, 312-3 
Art, 6-7, 29 note, 45, 89, 177 
Artemia Salina, transformations 

of, 72, 73 
Arthropods in evolution, 130-5, 

142 
Articulate species, 133 
Articulations of matter relative 
to action, 156, 367 
of motion, 310-1 
of real time, 332-3 
Artificial, how far scientific 
knowledge is, 197, 218-9 
instruments, 138, 139, 140-1 
Artist, in illustration of the crea- 

tiveness of duration, 340-1 
Ascending cosmic movement, 11, 

208, 275, 369 
Ascent toward God, in Aristotle, 

323 
Association of organisms, 260. 
See Individuation 
universal oscillation between 
association and individua- 
tion, 259, 260. See Socie- 
ties 
Astronomy and deduction, 213 
and the inert order, 224 
modern, in reference to ancient 
science, 334-6 
Atmosphere of spatiality bathing 

intelligence, 204 
Atom, 240, 254, 255 
as an intellectual view of mat- 
ter, 203 250 
and interpenetration, 207 
Attack and defence in evolution, 

131-2 
Attention, 2, 148-9, 154, 184, 209 
discontinuity of, 2 
in man and in lower animals, 
184. See Tension and in- 
stinct, Tension as inverted 
extension, Tension of person- 
ality, Sympathetic apprecia- 
tion, etc., Relaxation and in- 
tellect 
Attraction and impulsion in 

Greek philosophy, 323, 324 
Attribute and subject, 148 
Automatic activity, 145 
as instrument of voluntary, 252 
order, 224, 231-4. See Negative 



movement, etc., Geometrical 
order 
Automatism, 127, 143-4, 174, 223- 
4, 261, 264 

Background of instinct and intel- 
ligence, consciousness as, 186 

Backward-looking attitude of the 
intellect, 47, 48, 237 

Baldwin, J. M., 27 note 

Ballast of intelligence, 152, 230, 
239, 369-70 

Bastian, 212 note 

Bateson, 63 

Becoming, 164, 236, 248-9, 273, 
299-304, 307-8, 313-4, 316, 337- 

8, 342-3, 345, 363 

in ancient philosophy, 313-4, 

317 
in Descartes's philosophy, 346 
in Eleatic philosophy, 313-4, 315 
in general, or abstract becom- 
ing, 304, 306-7 
instantaneous and static views 

of, 272, 304-5 
states of, falsely so called, 164, 

247-8, 273, 298-301, 307-8 
in the successors of Kant, 363. 
See Change, JNew, Duration, 
Time, Views of reality 
Bees, 101, 140, 142, 146, 166, 172 
Beethoven, 224 
Berthold, 34 note 
Bethe, 176 note 

Bifurcations of tendency, 54. See 
Divergent lines of evolution 
Biology, 12, 25, 26, 31-2, 43, 168- 

9, 174-5, 194-6 
evolutionist, 168-9 

and philosophy, 43, 194-6 
and physico-chemistry, 26 

Blaringhem, 85 

Bodies, 156, 188, 189, 300-1, 360. 
See Inert matter as a relaxa- 
tion of the unextended into 
the extended 
denned as bundles of qualities. 
349 

Bois-Reymond (Du), 38 

Boltzmann, 245 

Bombines, social instincts in, 171 

Bouvier, 142 note 

Bow, strain of, illustrating indi- 
visibility of motion, 308-10 

Brain and consciousness, 5, 109. 
110, 179-80, 183-4, 212 note, 
252, 261-4, 270. 354, 356, 366. 
See Nervous System 



INDEX 



375 



Brain (Continued) 
in man and lower animals, 183, 
184, 263-5 

Brandt, 66 note 

Breast-plate, in reference to ani- 
mal mobility, 130, 131. See 
Carapace, Cellulose envelope 

Brown-Sequard, 80-2 

Bulb, medullary, in the develop- 
ment of the nervous system. 
110, 252 

Busquet, 259 note 

Butschli, 33 note 

Buttel-Reepen, 171 note 

Butterflies, in illustration of va- 
riation from evolutionary 
type, 72 

Caelo (De), of Aristotle, 322 note, 
324 note 

Calcareous sheath, in reference 
to animal mobility, 130-1 

Calkins, 16 note 

Canal, in illustration of the rela- 
tion of function and struc- 
ture, 93 

Canalization, in illustration of 
the function of animal organ- 
isms, 93, 95, 110, 126, 256, 270 

Canvas, embroidering "some- 
thing" on the, of "nothing" 
297 

Caprice, an attribute not of free- 
dom but of mechanism, 47 

Carapace, in reference to animal 
mobility, 130-1 

Carbohydrates, in reference to 
the function of the animal or- 
ganism, 121-2 

Carbon, in reference to the func- 
tion of organisms, 107, 113, 
114, 117, 254, 255 

Carbonic acid, in reference to the 
function of organisms, 254, 
255 

Carnot, 243, 246, 256 

Cartesian geometry, compared 
with ancient, 334 

Cartesianism, 345, 356, 358 

Cartesians, 358. See Spinoza, 
Leibniz 

Carving, the, of matter by intel- 
lect, 155 

Categorical propositions, charac- 
teristic of instinctive know- 
ledge, 149-50 

Categories, conceptual, x, xiii, 
48, 147, 148-9, 165, 189-90, 195- 
7, 207, 220-1, 257-60, 265, 358, 



Categories (Continued) 

361. See Concept deduction 
of, and genesis of the intel- 
lect, 196, 207, 359. See Gene- 
sis of matter and of the intel- 
lect 

innate, 147, 148-9 

misfit for the vital, x, xiii, 48, 
165, 195-9, 220-1, 257-9 

in reference to the adaptation 
to each other of the matter 
and form of knowledge, 361 
Cats, in illustration of the law of 

correlation, 67 
Causal relation in Aristotle, 325 

between consciousness and 
movement, 111 

in Greek philosophy, 324-5 
Causality, mechanical, a cate- 
gory which does not apply to 
life, x, xiv, 177 

in the philosophy of Ideas, 323-6 
Causation and adaptation, 101, 
102 

final, involves mechanical, 44 
Cause and effect as mathemati- 
cal functions of each other, 
20, 21 

efficient, 238, 277, 323 

efficient, in Aristotle's philoso- 
phy, 324 

efficient, in Leibniz's philoso- 
phy, 353 

final, 40, 44, 238 

final, in Aristotle's philoso- 
phy, 324 

by impulsion, release and un- 
winding, 73 

mechanical, as containing ef- 
fect, 14, 233, 269 

in the vital order, 95, 164 
Cave, Plato's allegory of the, 191 
Cell, 16, 24, 33, 162, 166, 167, 260, 
269 

as artificial construct, 162 

in the "colonial theory," 260 

division, 16, 24, 33 

instinct in the, 166, 167 

in relation to the soul, 269 
Cellulose envelope in reference to 
vegetable immobility and tor- 
por, 108, 111, 130 
Cerebral activity and conscious- 
ness, 5, 109-10, 180-1. 183-4, 
212 note, 252, 253, 261, 2G4, 
268, 270, 350, 351, 354, 355, 3fi(5 

mechanism, 5, 252, 253, 262, 264, 
366 
Cerebro-spinal system, 124. See 



376 



INDEX 



Nervous system 
Certainty of induction, 215, 

216 
Chance analogous to disorder, 
233, 234. See Affection 
in evolution, 86-7, 104, 114-5, 
126, 169-70, 171, 252, 254, 255, 
266, 267, 326-7. See Indeter- 
mination 
Change, 1, 7-8, 18, 85-6, 248, 275, 
294, 300-304, 308, 313-4, 317, 
326, 328-9, 343-4, 344-5 
in ancient philosophy, 313-4, 
316-7, 325-6, 327-9, 343, 345 
in Bleatic philosophy, 314 
known only from within, 307-8 
Chaos, 232. See Disorder 
Character, moral, 5, 99-100 
Charrin, 81 note 
Chemistry, 27, 34-6, 55, 72, 74, 

98, 194, 226, 256, 260 
Child, intelligence in, 147-8 
adolescence of, in illustration 
of evolutionary becoming, 
311-3 
Chipped stone, in paleontology, 

139 
Chlorophyllian function, 107-9, 

114, 117, 246, 253 
Choice, 110, 125, 143-5, 179, 180, 
252, 260-4, 276, 366 
and consciousness, 110, 179, 
260-4 
Chrysalis, 114 note 
Cinematograph, 306-7, 339-40 
Cinematographical character of 
ancient philosophy, 315-6 
of intellectual knowledge, 306, 

307, 312-8, 323-4, 331-3, 346 
of language, 306-7, 312-5 
of modern science, 329-31, 336- 
7, 341-3, 345, 346, 347 
Circle of the given, broken by 
action, 192, 247 
logical and physical, 277 
vicious, in intellectualist phi- 
losophy, 193, 197, 320 
vicious, in the intuitional 
method is only apparent, 192, 
193 
Circularity of God's thought in 
Aristotle's philosophy, 324 
of each special evolution, 128 
Circulation, protoplasmic, imi- 
tated, 32-3 
in plants and animals, 108 
Circumstances in the determina- 
tion of evolution, 101-2, 128- 
9, 133, 138, 142, 150-1, 167, 



Circumstances (Continued) 

168, 170-1, 193, 194, 252, 256 
in relation to special instincts, 
138, 168, 193 

Classes of words corresponding 
to the three kinds of repre- 
sentation, 303-4 

Clausius, 243 

Clearness characteristic of intel- 
lect, 160 

Cleft between the organized and 
the unorganized, 190, 196-9 

Climbing plants, instincts of, 170 
note 

Coincidence of matter with space 
as in Kant, 206, 207, 244 
of mind with intellect as in 

Kant, 48, 206 
of qualities, 216 
of seeing and willing, 237 
of self with self, definition of 
the feeling of duration, 199- 
200 

Coleopter, instinct in, 146 

Colonial theory, 259, 260 

Colonies, microbial, 259 

Color variation in lizards, 72, 74 

Coming and going of the mind 
between the without and the 
within gives rise to the idea 
of "Nothing," 279 
between nature and mind, the 
true method of philosophy, 
239 

Common-sense, 29, 153, 161, 213, 
224, 277 
denned as continuous experi- 
ence of the real, 213 

Comparison of ancient philosophy 
with modern, 226, 228-9, 232, 
328-9, 345-6, 349-51, 353-4, 
356 

Compenetration, 352-3. See In- 
terpenetration 

Complementarity of forms 

evolved, xii, xiii, 51, 101, 103, 
113, 116-7, 135, 136, 254, 255 
of instinct and intelligence, 146, 
173. See Opposition of In- 
stinct and Intelligence 
of intuition and intellect, 343, 

345 
in the powers of life, 49, 96-7, 
140-3, 177. 178-9, 183-5, 239, 
246, 254, 343 
of science and metaphysics, 344, 

Complexity of the order of math- 
ematics, 208-10, 217, 251 



INDEX 



377 



Compound reflex, instinct as a, 

174 
Concentration, intellect as, 191, 
301 

of personality, 198-9, 201 
Concentric spheres in Aristotle's 

philosophy, 328 
Concept accessory to action, ix, 

analogy of, with the solid body, 
ix 

in animals, 187 

externality of, 160, 168, 175-8, 
199-200, 251, 306, 311, 314 

fringed about with intuition, 46 

and image distinguished, 160, 
279 

impotent to grasp life, ix-xiii, 
49 

intellect the concept-making 
faculty, vi, 49 

misfit for the vital, 48 

representation of the act by 
which the intellect is fixed on 
things, 161 

synthesis of, in ancient philoso- 
phy, 325-6, 356. See Cate- 
gories, Externality, Frames, 
Image, Space, Symbol 
Conditions, external, in evolution, 
128-9, 133, 138, 141-2, 150-1, 
166-7, 168, 170, 193, 194, 251, 
256, 257 

external, in determination of 
special instinct, 141-2, 150-1, 
167, 168, 171 
Conduct, mechanism and finality 
in the evolution of, 47. See 
Freedom, Determination, In- 
determination 
Confused plurality of life, 257 
Conjugation of Infusoria, 16 
Consciousness and action, ix, 5, 
144, 145, 179-80, 207, 260-1 

consciousness as appendage to 
action, ix 

consciousness as arithmetical 
difference between possible 
and real activity, 145 

consciousness as auxiliary to 
action, 179-80 

consciousness as inadequacy 
of act to representation, 144 

consciousness as instrument of 
action, 180 

consciousness as interval be- 
tween possible and real ac- 
tion, 145, 179 

consciousness as light from 
zone of possible actions sur- 



Consciousness (Continued) 

rounding the real act, 179 

consciousness and locomotion, 
262 

consciousness plugged up by 
action, 144, 145. See Torpor, 
Sleep 

consciousness as sketch of ac- 
tion, 207 

intensity of, varies with ratio 
of possible to real action, 
145 
Consciousness in animals, as dis- 
tinguished from the con- 
sciousness of plants, 130, 135- 
6, 143 

as distinguished from the con- 
sciousness of man, 139-43, 

180, 183, 184, 187, 188, 212, 
263-9. See Torpor, Sleep 

characteristic of animals, tor- 
por of plants, 109, 111, 113, 
120, 128-9, 135-6, 181, 182, 292 

as background of instinct and 
intelligence, 186 

and brain, 180, 262, 263, 269, 
270, 354 

and choice, 110, 144-5, 179, 262-4 

coextensive with universal life, 
186, 270 

and creation, consciousness as 
demand for creation, 261 

current of, penetrating matter, 

181, 270 

as deficiency of instinct, 145 

in dog and man, 180 

double form of, 179 

function of, 207 

as hesitation or choice, 143, 144 

imprisonment of, 180, 183-4, 264 

as invention and freedom, 264, 
270 

in man as distinguished from, 
in lower forms of life, 180, 
263, 264, 267, 268 

and matter, 179, 181-2 

as motive principle of evolu- 
tion, 181-2 

nullified, as distinguished from 
the absence of consciousness, 
143 

and the organism, 270 

in plants, 131, 135-6, 143 

as world principle, 237, 261 
Conservation of energy, 243, 244 
Construction, 139-42, 150-1, 156, 
157-8, 180, 182. See Manufac- 
ture, Solid 

the characteristic work of in- 



378 



INDEX 



Construction ( Continued ) 
tellect, 163-4 
as the method of Kant's suc- 
cessors, 364-5 
Contingency, 96, 255, 268. See 
Accident, Chance 
the, of order, 231, 235 
Continuation of vital process in 
instinct, 138, 139, 166, 167, 246. 
See Variations, Vital process 
Continuity, 1, 26, 29-30, 37, 138- 
40, 154, 162-4, 258, 302, 306-7, 
311-2, 321, 325-6, 329-30, 347 
of becoming, 306-7, 312 
of change, 325-6 
of evolution, 18, 19 
of extension, 154 
of germinative plasma, 26, 37 
of instinct with vital process, 

139, 140, 166-7, 246 
of life, 1-11, 29, 163-4, 258 
of living substance, 162 
of psychic life, 1, 30 
of the real, 302, 329-30 
of sensible intuition with ultra- 
intellectual, 361 
of sensible universe, 346 
Conventionality of science, 207 
"Conversion" and "procession" in 

Alexandrian philosophy, 323 
Cook, Plato's comparison of the, 

and the dialectician, 156 
Cope, 35 note, 77, 111 
Correlation, law of, 66, 67 
Correspondence between mind 
and matter in Spencer, 368. 
See Simultaneity 
Cortical mechanism, 252, 253, 262. 

See Cerebral mechanism 
Cosmogony and genesis of mat- 
ter, 188. See Genesis of mat- 
ter and of intellect, Spencer 
Cosmology the, that follows from 
the philosophy of Ideas, 315, 
328 
as reversed psychology, 208 
Counterweight representation as, 

to action, 145 
Counting simultaneities, the 
measurement of time is, 338, 
341-2 
Creation, xi, 7, 11, 12, 22, 29, 30, 
45, 93, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 
114, 128-31, 161, 163-4, 178, 
200, 217, 218, 223, 226, 230, 237- 
40, 261, 270, 275, 339-40 
in Descartes's philosophy, 345 
of intellect, 248-9 
of matter, 237, 239, 247-8, 249. 



Creation (Continued) 

See Materiality the inversion 
of spirituality 
of present by past, 5, 20-3, 27, 

167, 199-202 
the vital order as, 230 
Creative evolution, 7, 15, 21, 27, 
29, 36, 37, 65, 100, 104-5, 161, 
163, 223-4, 230-1, 237, 264, 269 
Creativeness of free action, 192, 
243 
of invention, 250 
Creeping plants in illustration of 

vegetable mobility, 108 
Cricket victim of paralyzing in- 
stinct of sphex, 172 
Criterion, quest of a, 53 ff. 

of evolutionary rank, 133, 265 
Criticism, Kantian, 205, 287 note, 
356, 360-2 
of knowledge, 194-5 
Cross-cuts through becoming by 
intellect, 314. See Views of 
reality 
through matter by perception, 
206 
Cross-roads of vital tendency, 51, 

52, 54, 110, 126 
Crustacea, 19, 111, 129-30 
Crystal illustrating (by contrast) 

individuation, 12 
Cu6not, 79 note 

Culminating points of evolution- 
ary progress, 50, 133-5. See 
Evolutionary superiority 
Current, 26, 27, 51, 185, 236, 237, 

250, 266, 269 
Currents, antagonistic, 250 
of existence, 185 
of life penetrating matter, 26, 

27, 266, 270 
vital, 26, 27, 51, 237, 266, 270 
of will penetrating matter, 237 
Curves, as symbol of life, 32, 90, 

213 
Cuts through becoming by the in- 
tellect, 313-4. See Views of 
reality, Snapshots in illustra- 
tion, etc. 
through matter by perception, 
206 
Cuvier, 125 note 

Dantec (Le), 18 note, 34 note 
Darwin, 62-5, 66, 72, 108, 170 note 
Darwinism, 56, 85, 86 
Dastre, 36 note 

Dead, the, is the object of in- 
tellect, 165 



INDEX 



379 



Dead-locks in speculation, 155, 

312 
Death, 246 note, 271 
Declivity descended by matter, 
208, 246, 256, 339-40. See De- 
scending movement 
Decomposing and recomposing 
powers characteristic of in- 
tellect, 157, 251 
Deduction, analogy between, re- 
lated to moral sphere and 
tangent to curve, 213 
and astronomy, 213 
duration refractory to, 213 
geometry the ideal limit of, 

213-26, 361 
in animals, 212 

inverse to positive spiritual ef- 
fort, 212 
nature of, 211 
physics and, 213 
weakness of, in psychology and 
moral science, 213 
Defence and attack in evolution, 

132 
Deficiency of will the negative 
condition of mathematical 
order and complexity, 209 
Definition in the realm of life, 

13, 105, 106 
Degenerates, 133-5 
Degenerescence senile (La), by 

Metchnikoff, 18 note 
Degradation of energy, 241, 242, 
246 
of the extra-spatial into the 

spatial, 207 
of the ideas into the sensible 
flux in ancient philosophy, 
317-9, 324-5, 327-9, 331, 343, 
345, 352-3 
Degrees of being in the succes- 
sors of Kant, 362-3 
Degrees of reality in Greek phi- 
losophy, 324, 327 
Delage, 59 note, 81 note, 260 note 
Delamare, 81 note 
Deliberation, 144 
De Manaceine, 124 note 
Deposit, instinct and intelligence 
as deposits, emanations, is- 
sues, or aspects of life, x, xii, 
xiii, 49, 103, 105, 136, 365 
De Saporta, 107 note 
Descartes, 280, 334, 345, 346, 353, 358 
becoming, 345-6 
creation, 346 
determinism, 345 
duration, 346 



Descartes (Continued) 
freedom, 345, 346 
geometry, 334 
God, 346 

image and idea or concept, 281 
indeterminism, 345 
mechanism, 345, 346 
motion, 346 

vacillation between abstract 
time and real duration, 345 
Descending movement of exist- 
ence, 11, 202, 203, 208, 271, 
275, 369 
Design, motionless, of action the 
object of intellect, 154-5, 299, 
301-2, 303 
Detention in the dream state, 202 

of intuition in intellect, 238 
Determination, 76-7, 129-30, 223, 

246 
Determinism, 217, 264, 345, 348. 
See Inert matter, Geometry 
in Descartes, 345 
Development, 133, 134-5, 141. See 
Order, Progress, Evolution, 
Superiority 
Deviation from type, 82-4 
Dialect and intuition in philoso- 
phy, 238 
Dichotomy of the real in modern 

philosophy, 350 
Differentiation of parts in an or- 
ganism, 253, 260 
Dilemma of any systematic meta- 
physics, 195, 197, 230 
Diminution, derivation of becom- 
ing from being by, in ancient 
philosophy, 316, 317, 322, 323- 
4, 327-8, 343-5, 352 
geometrical order as, or lower 
complication of the vital or- 
der, 236 
Dionaea illustrating certain ani- 
mal characteristics in plants, 
107, 108, 109 
Discontinuity of action, 154, 306-7 
of attention, 2 
of extension relative to action, 

154, 163 
of knowledge, 306 
of living substance, 163 
a positive idea, 154 
Discontinuous the object of in- 
tellect, 154 
Discord in nature, 127, 128, 254-5, 

267 
Disorder, 40, 104, 222-3, 225-6, 
232-5, 274. See Expectation, 
Order, mathematical, Orders 



380 



INDEX 



of reality, two 

Disproportion between an inven- 
tion and its consequences, 182 

Dissociation as a cosmic principle 
opposed to association, 260 
of tendencies, 54, 89, 135, 254, 
255, 257, 258. See Divergent 
lines of evolution 

Distance, extension as the, be- 
tween what is and what 
ought to be, 318-9, 327-8, 331 

Distinct multiplicity in the dream 
state, 201, 210 
of the inert, 257 

Distinctness characteristic of the 
intellect, 160, 237, 251 
characteristic of perception, 

227 251 
as s'patiality, 203, 207-8, 244, 
250 

Divergent lines of evolution, xii, 
54, 55, 87, 97-101, 103-4, 106, 
107, 109, 112, 113, 116, 119, 
130, 132, 134-5, 142, 149, 150, 
168, 173, 181, 254, 255, 266, 267. 
See Dissociation of tenden- 
cies, Complementarity, etc., 
Schisms in the primitive im- 
pulsion of life 

Diversity, sensible, 205, 220-1, 
231, 235, 236 

Divination, instinct as, 176. See 
Sympathy, etc. 

Divisibility of extension, 154, 162 

Divison as function of intellect, 
152, 154, 162-3, 189 
of labor, 99, 110, 118, 157, 166, 

260 
of labor in cells, 166 

Dog and man, consciousness in, 
180 

Dogmatism of the ancient episte- 

mology contrasted with the 

relativism of the modern, 230 

of Leibniz and Spinoza, 356-7 

skepticism, and relativism, 196- 

7, 230 

Dogs and the law of correlation, 
66 

Domestication of animals and 
heredity, 80 

Dominants of Reinke, 42 note 

Dorfmeister, 72 

Dream, 144, 180-1, 202, 209, 256. 
See Interpenetration, Relaxa- 
tion, Detention, Recollection 
as relaxation, 202 

Driesch, 42 note 

Drosera, 107, 108, 109 



Dufourt, 124 note 
Duhem, 242 note 
Dunan, Ch., xv note 
Duration xiv note, 2, 4-6, 8-11, 
15, 17, 21, 22, 37, 39, 46, 51, 
199, 201, 206, 213, 216, 240, 
272, 273, 276, 298-9, 308-9, 317- 
8, 319 note, 324, 328, 332, 339, 
342, 343, 345, 354, 361, 363-4 

absoluteness of, 206 

and deduction, 213 

in Descartes's philosophy, 346 

gnawing of, 4, 8, 46 

indivisibility of, 6, 308-9 

and induction, 216 

and the inert, 343-4 

in the philosophy of the Ideas, 
316-7, 319 note, 324, 327, 328-9 

rhythm of, 11, 128, 346. See 
Creation, Evolution, Inven- 
tion, Time, Unforeseeable- 
ness, Uniqueness 

Echinoderms in reference to ani- 
mal mobility, 130, 131 

Efficient cause in conception of 
chance, 234 
Spinoza and, 269 

Effort in evolution, 170 

Eldos 314-5 

Eimer, 55, 72, 73, 86 

Elaborateness of the mathemati- 
cal order, 208-10, 217, 251 

Eleatic philosophy, 308, 314-5 

Emanation, logical thought an, 
issue, aspect or deposit of 
life, ix, xii, xiii, 49 

Embroidering "something" on 
the canvas of "nothing," 297 

Embroidery by descendants on 
the canvas handed down by 
ancestors, 23 

Embryo, 18, 19, 26, 27, 75, 81, 89, 
101, 166 

Embryogeny, comparative, and 
transformism, 25 

Embryonic life, 27, 166 

Empirical study of evolution the 
centre of the theory of know- 
ledge and of the theory of 
life, 178 
theories of knowledge, 205 

Empty, thinking the full by 
means of the empty, 273-4 

End in Eleatic philosophy, 314-5 
of science is practical utility, 
329 

Energy, 115-7, 120-3, 242, 243, 
245, 246, 252-5, 256, 257, 262 



INDEX 



381 



Energy (Continued) 
conservation of, 242 
degradation of, 242, 243, 246 
solar, stored by plants, released 
by animals, 245, 254 
Enneadae of Plotinus, 210 note 
Entelechy of Driesch, 42 note 
Entropy, 243 

Environment in evolution, 129, 
133, 138, 140, 142, 150, 167, 
168, 170, 192, 193, 252, 256, 257 
and special instincts, 138, 168, 
192, 193 
Epiphenomenalism, 262 
Essence and accidents in Aris- 
totle's philosophy, 353 
or form in Eleatic philosophy, 

314-5 
the meaning of, 302-3 
Essences (or forms), qualities 
and acts, the three kinds of 
representation, 303-4 
Eternity, 39, 298, 314, 317, 320, 
324, 328 : 346, 352, 354 
in the philosophy of Ideas, 316- 

7, 319, 324, 328 
in Spinoza's philosophy, 353 
Euglena, 116 
Evellin, 311 note 
Eventual actions, 11, 96. See 

Possible activity 
Evolution, ix-xv, 18, 20, 22, 24, 
25, 26-7, 37, 46-55, 63, 68, 79 
note, 84-8, 97-105, 107, 113, 
116, 126, 127, 129-30, 131-2, 
133, 134, 136, 138-40, 141-2, 
143, 161, 166, 167, 168-72, 173, 
174, 175, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186, 
190, 193, 198-9, 207-8, 224 231, 
242 note, 246, 248, 249, 251, 
252, 254, 264-6, 268, 273, 302, 
311, 345, 359, 360, 366 
accident in, 104, 169, 170, 173, 

174, 251, 252 
animal, a progress toward mo- 
bility, 131 
antagonistic tendencies in, 103, 

113, 185 
automatic and determinate, is 

action being undone, 248 
blind alleys of, 129 
circularity of each special, 128 
complementarity of the diver- 
■ gent lines of, 97-102, 103, 116 
conceptually inexpressible, 49, 

50, 52, 53, 127, 181, 273 
continuity of, 18, 19, 26, 37, 46, 

273, 302, 312, 345 
creative, 7, 15, 21, 27, 30, 36, 37, 



Evolution, (Continued) 

65, 100, 105, 161, 162, 163, 22:;, 
230, 238, 264, 269 

culminating points of, 50, 133, 
174, 185, 265, 266. 268 

development by, 133, 134, 141-2 

divergent lines of, xii, 53, 54, 
87, 97-101, 103-4, 107, 173-4, 
246 

and duration, 20, 22, 37, 45-6 

empirical study of, the centre 
of the theory of knowledge 
and of life, 178 

and environment, 101-3, 129, 
133, 138, 142 150, 167, 168, 169, 
192, 193, 251, 256, 257 

of instinct, 170, 171, 174-5. See 
Divergent lines, etc., Culmi- 
nating points, etc., Evolution 
and environment 

of intellect, x-xii, 153, 186, 189- 
90, 193, 198-9, 207-8, 359, 360. 
See Divergent lines, etc., Cul- 
minating points, etc., Genesis 
of matter and of intellect 

as invention, 344 

of man, 264, 266, 268. See Cul- 
minating points, etc. 

motive principle of, is con- 
sciousness, 181 

of species product of the vital 
impetus opposed by matter, 
247-8, 254 

and transformism, 24 

unforeseeable, 47, 48, 53, 86, 
224 

variation in, 23-4, 55, 63, 68, 72 
note, 85, 131, 137-8, 167, 169, 
171, 264 
Evolutionary, qualitative, and 
extensive motion 302-3, 311, 
312 

superiority, 133-5, 174-5. See 
Success, Criterion of evolu- 
tionary rank, Culminating 
points, etc. 
Evolutionism, x-xii, xiv, 77, 84, 

364 
Exhaustion of the mutability of 

the universe, 337-8 
Existence, logical, as contrasted 
with psychical and physical, 
276, 362 

of matter tends toward instan- 
taneity, 201 

of self means change, 1 ff. 

superaddition of, upon nothing- 
ness, 276 
Expectation, 214-6, 221, 222, 226, 



382 



INDEX 



Expectation (Continued) 
233, 235, 274, 281, 292 
in conception of disorder, 221, 

222, 226, 233, 234, 235, 274 
in conception of void or naught, 
282 292 
Experience, 138, 147, 177, 197, 204, 

229, 321, 354, 359, 363, 368 
Explosion, illustrating cause by 

release, 73 
Explosive character of animal 
energy, 116, 119, 120, 246 
of organization, 92 
Explosives, manufacture of, by 
plants and use by animals, 
246, 254 
Extension, 149, 154, 161, 202, 203, 
207, 211, 223, 236, 245, 318-20, 
324, 327, 351, 352 
continuity of, 154 
discontinuity of, relative to ac- 
tion, 154, 162 
as the distance between what 
is and what ought to be, 318 
divisibility of, 154, 162 
the most general property of 

matter, 154, 250, 251 
the inverse movement to ten- 
sion, 245 
of knowledge, 150 
in Leibniz's philosophy, 351, 

352 
of matter in space, 204, 211 
in the philosophy of Ideas, 318- 

9, 323-4, 327 
and relaxation, 202, 207, 209, 

211, 212, 218, 223, 245 
in Spinoza's philosophy, 350 
in the Transcendental Aes- 
thetic, 203 
unity of, 158-9 

as weakening of the essence of 
being, in Plotinus, 210 note 
Extensive, evolutionary and 
qualitative motion, 302-3, 311, 
312 
External conditions in evolution, 
128, 133, 137, 141-2, 150-1, 167, 
168, 170, 192, 193, 252, 256, 257 
finality, 41 
Externality of concepts, 160, 168, 
174, 177, 199, 251, 305, 311-4 
the most general property of 
matter, 154, 250, 251 
Externalized action in distinction 
from internalized, 147, 165. 
See Somnambulism, etc., 
Automatic activity, etc. 
Bye of mollusc and vertebrate 



compared, 60, 75, 77, 84, 86, 
87-8 

Fabre, 172 note 

Fabrication. See Construction 

Fallacies, two fundamental, 272, 
273 

Fallacy of thinking being by not- 
being, 276, 277, 284, 297-8 
of thinking the full by the emp- 
ty, 273-5 
of thinking motion by the 
motionless, 272, 273, 297-8, 
307-8, 309-14 

Fallibility of instinct, 172-3 

Falling back of matter upon con- 
sciousness, 264 
bodies, comparison of Aristotle 

and Galileo, 228, 331-2, 334 
weight, figure of material 
world, 245, 246 

Familiar, the, is the object of in- 
tellect, 163, 164, 199, 270 

Faraday, 203 

Fasting, in reference to primacy 
of nervous system over the 
other physiological systems, 
124 

Fauna, menace of torpor in 
primitive, 130 

Feeling in the conception of 
chance, 207 
and instinct, 143, 174-5 

Fencing-master, illustrating he- 
reditary transmission, 79 

Ferments, certain characteristics 
of, 106 

Fertilization of orchids by 
insects, by Darwin, 170 
note 

Fichte's conception of the intel- 
lect, 189-90, 357 

Filings, iron, in illustration of 
the relation of structure to 
function, 94, 95 

Film, cinematographic, figure of 
abstract motion, 304-6 

Final cause, 40, 45, 234, 325 
conception of, involves con- 
ception of mechanical cause, 
44 
God as, in Aristotle, 322-3 

Finalism, 39-53, 58, 74, 88-97, 101- 
5, 126-8 

Finality, 41, 164, 177-8, 185, 223, 

224, 266 

external and internal, 41 
misfit for the vital, 177, 223-4, 

225, 266 



INDEX 



383 



Finality (Continued) 
and the unforeseeableness of 
life, 164, 185 
Fischel, 75 note 

Fish in illustration of animal 

tendency to mobility, 130, 131 

Fixation of nutritive elements, 

107-9, 113, 117, 246, 247, 253 
Fixity, 108-13, 118, 119, 130, 155. 
See Torpor 
apparent or relative, 155 
cellulose envelope and the, of 

plants, 108, 111, 130 
of extension, 155 
of plants, 108-13, 118, 119, 130-1 
of torpid animals, 130 
Flint hatchets and human intel- 
ligence, 137 
Fluidity of life, 153, 165, 193 

of matter as a whole, 186, 369 
Flux of material bodies, 265 
of reality, 250, 251, 337, 342, 
344 
Flying arrow of Zeno, 308, 309, 

310 
Focalization of personality, 201 
Food, 106-9, 113-4, 117, 120, 121, 

246, 247, 254 
Foraminifera, failure of certain, 

to evolve, 197 
Force, 126-7, 141, 149, 150, 175, 
246, 254, 339 
life a, inverse to matter, 246 
limitedness of vital force, 126, 

127, 141, 149, 162 
time as, 339-40 
Forel, 176 note 
Foreseeing, 8, 28, 29, 30, 37, 45, 47, 

96. See Unforeseeableness 
Form, xi, 51, 101, 104, 113, 116-8, 
129, 135-6, 148-53, 155, 156, 
160, 164, 195-7, 222, 237, 250, 
255, 302, 303, 314, 317, 318, 322, 
341, 357, 359, 361, 362 
complementarity of forms 
evolved, xi, 51, 101, 104, 113. 
116-8, 135-6, 255 
expansion of the forms of con- 
sciousness, xii, xiii 
(or essences), qualities and 
acts the three kinds of repre- 
sentation, 302-3 
God as pure form in Aristotle, 

196, 322 
or idea in ancient philosophy, 

317, 318, 330 
of intelligence, xiv, 48, 147, 148, 
165, 190, 195, 196, 198, 207, 
219, 257-9, 266, 358-9, 361. See 



Form (Continued) 
Concept 

and matter in creation, 239, 250 

and matter in knowledge, 195, 
361 

a snapshot view of transition, 
302 
Formal knowledge, 152 

logic, 292 
Forms of sensibility, 361 
Fossil species, 102 
Foster, 125 note 

Fox in illustration of animal in- 
telligence, 138 
Frames of the understanding, 46- 
7, 48, 150-2, 173, 177, 197-9, 
219-20, 223-4, 258, 270, 313, 
358, 364 

fit the inert, 197, 218 

inadequate to reality entire, 364 

misfit for the vital, x, xiii, xiv, 
46, 48, 173, 177, 197-9, 223, 
258, 313 

product of life, 358 

transform freedom into neces- 
sity, 270 

utility of, lies in their unlimited 
application, 149-50, 152 
Freedom, 11, 48, 126, 130, 163, 
164, 200, 202, 207, 208, 217, 
223, 231, 237, 239, 247, 249, 
264-6, 269, 270, 277, 300, 339- 
41, 345, 346 

the absolute as freely acting, 
277 

affirmed by conscience, 269 

animal characteristic rather 
than vegetable, 129-30 

caprice attribute not of, but of 
mechanism, 47 

coextensiveness of conscious- 
ness with, 111, 112, 202, 264, 
270 

of creation and life, 247, 254, 
255 

creativeness of, 223, 239, 248 

in Descartes's philosophy, 345, 
346 

as efficient causality, 277 

inversion of necessity, 236 

and liberation of consciousness, 
265, 266. See Imprisonment 
of consciousness 

and novelty, 12, 163, 164, 200, 
218, 231, 239, 249, 270, 339-42 

order in, 223 

property of every organism, 
129-31 

relaxation of, into necessity, 217 



384 



INDEX 



Freedom (Continued) 

tendency of, to self-negation in 
habit, 127 

tension of, 200, 201, 202, 207, 
223, 237, 301 

transformed by the under- 
standing into necessity, 270 

See Spontaneity 
Fringe of intelligence around in- 
stinct, 136 

of intuition around intellect, 
xii, xiii, 46 

of possible action around real 
action, 179, 272 
Froth, alveolar, in imitation of 

organic phenomena, 33-4 
Full, fallacy of thinking the, by 

the empty, 273-6 
Function, ix, 3, 5, 44, 46, 47, 88- 
90, 94, 95, 106-10, 113, 114, 117, 
120, 121, 127, 132, 140, 141, 145, 
152, 153, 157, 161, 163, 164, 168, 
173-5, 186-92, 199, 206, 207, 
233, 237, 246, 251, 254-6, 262, 
263, 270, 273, 298, 306, 346, 
358, 369 

accumulation of energy the 
function of vegetable organ- 
isms, 254, 255 

action the, of intellect, ix, 12, 
44, 47, 93, 161, 162, 186-8, 206, 
251, 273, 305 

action the, of nervous system, 
262, 263 

alimentation, 106, 107, 120, 121, 
246, 254 

of animals is canalization of 
energy, 93, 110, 126, 255, 256 

carbon and the, of organisms, 
107, 113, 114, 117, 254, 255 

chlorophyllian, 107-9, 114, 117, 
246, 254 

concept-making the, of intel- 
lect, x, 49 

of consciousness: sketching 
movements, 207 

construction the, of intellect^ 
108 

illumination of action, of per- 
ception, 5, 206, 307-8 

of intelligence: action, ix, 12, 44, 
46, 93, 160, 162, 186-8, 206, 
251, 273, 307-8 

of intelligence: concept-making, 
x, 50 

of intelligence: construction, 
160, 163, 181-2 

of intelligence: division, 154, 
155, 162, 189 



Function (.Continued) 

of intelligence: illumination of 
action by perception, 5, 206, 
301 

of intelligence: repetition, 164, 
199, 214-6 

of intelligence: retrospection, 
47, 237 

of intelligence: connecting same 
with same, 199, 233, 270 

of intelligence: scanning the 
rhythm of the universe, 346 

of intelligence: tactualizing all 
perception, 168 

of intelligence: unification, 152, 
154, 357 

of the nervous system: action, 
262, 263 

and organ, 88-90, 94, 95, 132-3, 
140, 141, 158. See Function 
and structure 

and organ in arthropods, verte- 
brates and man, 132-3 

of the organism, 94, 106-10, 112, 
114, 117, 120, 126, 173-5, 246, 
253-6 

cf the organism, alimentation, 
106, 107, 120, 121, 246, 254 

of the organism, animal: canal- 
ization of energy, 93, 110, 126, 
255, 256 

of the organism, carbon in, 107, 
113, 114, 117, 254, 255 

of the organism, chlorophyllian 
function, 107-9, 114, 117, 246, 
247, 254 

of the organism, primary func- 
tions of life: storage and ex- 
penditure of energy, 254-6 

of the organism, vegetable: ac- 
cumulation of energy, 254, 
255 

of philosophy: adoption of the 
evolutionary movement of 
life and consciousness, 370 

of science, 168, 346 

sketching movements the, of 
consciousness, 207 

and structure, 55, 62, 66, 69, 74, 
75, 76, 86, 88-91, 93, 94, 96, 118, 
132, 140, 141, 158, 162, 250, 
252, 256 

tactualizing all perception the, 
of science, 168 

of vegetable organism: accumu- 
lation of energy, 254, 255 
Functions of life, the two: stor- 
age and expenditure of ener- 
gy, 254-6 



INDEX 



385 



Galileo, homogeneity of time in, 
332 
his influence on metaphysics, 

20, 228 
his influence on modern science, 

334, 335 
extension of Galileo's physics, 

357, 370 
his theory of the fall of bodies 
compared with Aristotle's, 
228, 331, 332, 334 
Ganoid breastplate of ancient 
fishes, in reference to animal 
mobility, 130, 131 
Gaudry, 130 note 
Genera, relation of, to individu- 
als, 226 
relation of, to laws, 225, 226, 

330 
potential, 226-7 
and signs, 158 
Generality, ambiguity of the idea 
of, in philosophy, 236, 229-31 
Generalization dependent on 
repetition, 230, 231 
distinguished from transference 

of sign, 158 
in the vital and mathematical 
orders, 224, 225, 230 
Generic, type of the: similarity of 
structure between generating 
and generated, 223, 224 
Genesis, xiii, xiv, 153, 186-199, 
207, 359, 360 
of intellect, xiii, xiv, 153, 186, 

187, 190, 193, 194, 196-7, 207, 
264, 360 

of knowledge, 191 

of matter, xiii, xiv, 153, 186, 

188, 190, 193, 199, 207, 360 
Genius and the willed order, 223, 

237 

Genus. See Genera 

Geometrical, the, is the object 
of the intellect, 190 

Geometrical order as a diminu- 
tion or lower complication of 
the vital, 223, 225, 236, 330. 
See Genera, Relation of, to 
laws 
mutual contingency of, and 

vital order, 235 
See Mathematical order 
space, relation of, to the spa- 
tiality of things, 203 

Geometrism, the latent, of intel- 
lect, 194, 211-3 

Geometry, fitness of, to matter, 
10 



Geometry, (Continued) 

goal of intellectual operations, 
211, 213, 218 

ideal limit of induction and de- 
duction, 214-8, 361. See 
Space, Descending movement 
of existence 

modern, compared with ancient, 

36, 161, 333-4 
natural, 194, 211-2 
perception impregnated with, 

205, 230 
reasoning in, contrasted with 
reasoning concerning life, 7, 
8 
scientific, 161, 211 
Germ, accidental predisposition 
of, in Neo-Darwinism, 168, 
169, 170 
Germ-plasm, continuity of, 27, 

37, 78-83 
Giard, 84 

Glucose in organic function, 122, 

123 
Glycogen in organic function, 

122-4 
God, as activity, 249 

of Aristotle, 196, 322, 325, 349, 

353, 356-7 
ascent toward, in Aristotle's 

philosophy, 322-3 
circularity of God's thought, in 
Aristotle's philosophy, 324, 
325 
in Descartes's philosophy, 346, 

347 
as efficient cause in Aristotle's 

philosophy, 324 
as hypostasis of the unity of 

nature, 196, 322, 357 
in Leibniz's philosophy, 352, 

353, 356-7 
as eternal matter, 196-7 
as pure form, 196-7, 322 
in Spinoza's philosophy, 351, 
357 
Greek philosophy. See Ancient 

philosophy 
Green parts of plants, 107-9, 114, 

117, 246, 247, 254 
Growing old, 15 
Growth, creation is, 240-1, 275 
and novelty, 231 
of the powers of life, 132, 134-5 
reality is, 237 
of the universe, 343, 345 
Guerin, P., 59 note 
Guinea-pig, in illustration of 
hereditary transmission, 80, 81 



386 



INDEX 



Habit and consciousness an- 
nulled, 143 
form of knowledge a habit or 

bent of attention, 148 
and heredity, 78, 93, 169, 170, 
173. See Acquired characters, 
inheritance of 
Instinct as an intelligent, 173-4 
and invention in animls, 264 
and invention in man, 265 
tendency of freedom to self- 
negation in, 127-8 
Harmony between instinct and 
life, and between intelligence 
and the inert, 187, 194-5, 198 
of the organic world is comple- 
mentarity due to a common 
original impulse 50, 51, 103, 
116, 118 
pre-established, 205, 206 
in radical finalism, 127-8. See 
Discord 
Hartog, 60 note 

Hatchets, ancient flint, and hu- 
man intellect, 137 
Heliocentric radius -vector in 

Kepler's laws, 333-4 
Hereditary transmission, 76-83, 
87, 168-9, 170, 173, 225-6, 230 
domestication of animals and, 

80-1 
habit and, 79, 83, 169, 170, 173 
Hesitation or choice, conscious- 
ness as, 143, 144 
Heteroblastia and identical struc- 
tures on divergent lines of 
evolution, 75 
Heymons, 72 note 
History as creative evolution, 6, 
15, 21, 26, 29, 36, 37, 65-6, 103- 
4, 105, 163, 264, 269 
of philosophy, 238 
Hive as an organism, 166 
Homo faber, designation of hu- 
man species, 139 
Homogeneity of space, 156, 212 
the sphere of intellect, 163 
of time in Galileo, 332 
Horse-fly illustrating the object 

of instinct, 146 
Houssay, 109 note 
Human and animal attention, 184 
and animal brain, 184, 263-5 
and animal consciousness, 139- 
43, 180, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 
212, 263-8 
and animal instruments of ac- 
tion, 139-43, 150 
and animal intelligence, 138, 



Human (Continued) 

187, 188, 191, 192, 212 
and animal invention, relation 

of, to habit, 264, 265 
intellect and language, 157-8 
intellect and manufacture, 137, 
138 
Humanity in evolution, 134, 137-9, 
142, 147, 158, 181, 184, 185, 264- 
71. See Culminating points, 
etc. 
goal of evolution, 266, 267 
Huxley, 38 

Hydra and individuality, 13 
DAT) of Aristotle, 353 
Hymenoptera, the culmination of 
arthropod and instinctive 
evolution, 134, 173-4 
as entomologists, 146, 172-3 
organization and instinct in, 140 
paralyzing Instinct of, 146, 172, 

173-4 
social instincts of, 101, 171 
Hypostasis of the unity of na- 
ture, God as, 196-7, 322, 356 
Hypothetical propositions charac- 
teristic of intellectual know- 
ledge, 149-50 

Idea or form in ancient philoso- 
phy, 49, 314, 316-7, 318, 329- 
30 

in ancient philosophy, ecdos, 314-5 
in ancient philosophy, Platonic, 

48 
and image in Descartes, 280 
Idealism, 232 

Idealists and realists alike as^ 
sume the possibility of an ab^ 
sence of order, 220, 232 
Identical structures in divergent 
lines of evolution, 55, 60-1, 62, 
69, 74-7, 86, 119 
Illumination of action the func- 
tion of perception, 5, 206, 307 
Image and idea in Descartes, 280 
distinguished from concept, 
160-1, 280 
Imitation of being in Greek phi- 
losophy, 324, 327 
of instinct by science, 168-9, 

173-4 
of life in intellectual represen- 
tation, 4, 33, 88-9, 101, 176, 
208, 209, 213, 226, 259, 341, 
365 
of life by the unorganized, 83, 
35, 36 



INDEX 



387 



Imitation (Continued) 

of motion by intelligence, 305, 
307-8, 312, 313, 329. See Imi- 
tation of the real, etc. 

of the physical order by the 
vital, 230 

of the real by intelligence, 258, 
270, 307 
Immobility of extension, 155 

and plants, 108-13, 118, 119, 130 

of primitive and torpid ani- 
mals, 130-1 

relative and apparent; mobility 
real, 155 
Impatience, duration as, 10, 339- 

40 
Impelling cause, 73 
Impetus, vital, divergence of, 26- 
7, 51-5, 97-105, 110, 118-9, 126- 
7, 131, 134-6, 257, 258, 266, 
270 

vital, limitedness of, 126, 141, 
148-9, 254 

vital, loaded with matter, 239 

vital, as necessity for creation, 
252, 261 

vital, transmission of, through 
organisms, 25, 27, 79, 85, 87,, 
88, 230, 231, 250, 251 

vital. See Impulse of life 
Implement, the animal, is natur- 
al: the human, artificial, 139- 
43 

artificial, 137-40, 150-1 

constructing, function of intel- 
ligence, 159, 182-3 

life known to intelligence only 
as, 162 

matter known to Intelligence 
only as, 161, 198 

natural, 141, 145, 150 

organized, 141, 145, 150 

unorganized, 137-9, 141, 150-1 
Implicit knowledge, 148 
Impotence of intellect and per- 
ception to grasp life, 176-8 
Imprisonment of consciousness, 

180-3, 264-6 
Impulse of life, divergence of, 26, 
27, 51-5, 97-105, 110, 118-9, 
126-7, 131, 134-6, 257, 258, 266, 
270 

limitedness of, 126, 141, 148-9, 
254 

loaded with matter, 239 

tendency to mobility, 131, 132 

as necessity for creation, 252, 
261 

negates itself, 247, 248 



Impulse (Continued) 
prolonged in evolution, 246 
prolonged in our will, 239 
transmitted through genera- 
tions of organisms, 25, 26, 79, 
85, 87, 230, 231 
unity of, 202, 250, 270 
Impulsion and attraction in 
Greek philosophy, 323-4 
release and unwinding, the 

three kinds of cause, 73 
given to mind by matter, 202 
Inadequacy of act to representa- 
tion, consciousness as, 143 
Inadequate and adequate in 

Spinoza, 353 
Inanition, illustrating primacy of 

nervous system, 124 note 
Incoherence, 236. See Absence 
of order, Chance, Chaos 
in nature, 104 
Incommensurability of free act 
with conceptual idea, 47, 201 
of instinct and intelligence, 167- 
8, 175 
Incompatibility of developed ten- 
dencies, 104, 168 
Independent variable, time as, 20, 

335-6 
Indetermination, 86, 114, 126, 252, 
253, 326. See Accident in 
evolution 
Indeterminism in Descartes, 345 
Individual, viewed by intelligence 
as aggregate of molecules 
and of facts, 250-1 
and division of labor, 140 
in evolutionist biology, 169, 171, 

246 note 
and genus, 226-9 
mind in philosophy, 191 
aesthetic intuition only attains 

the, 177 
and society, 260, 265 
transmits the vital Impetus, 
250, 259, 270 
Individuality never absolute, x, 
12, 13, 16, 19, 42, 260 
and age, 15-23, 27, 43 
corporeal, physics tends to 
deny, 188, 189, 208. See In- 
terpenetration. Obliteration 
of outlines, Solidarity of the 
parts of matter 
and generality, 226-8 
the many and the one in the 

idea of, x, 258 
as plan of possible influence, 11 
Individuation never absolute, x, 



388 



INDEX 



Individuation (Continued) 
12-16, 43, 260 

as a cosmic principle in con- 
trast with association, 259- 
60 

property of life, 12-5 

partly the work of matter, 257- 
8, 259, 270 
Indivisibility of action, 94, 95, 

of duration, 6, 308 

of invention, 164 

of life, 225, 270-1. See Unity 
of life of motion, 307-11 . 
Induction in animals, 214 

certainty of, approached as 
factors approach pure mag- 
nitudes, 222, 223 

and duration, 216 

and expectation, 214-6 

geometry the ideal limit of, 214- 
8, 361. See Space, Geometry, 
Reasoning, "Descending" 

movement of matter, etc. 

and magnitude, 215, 216 

repetition the characteristic 
function of intellect, 164, 199, 
205-16 

and space, 216. See Space as 
the ideal limit, Systems, etc. 
Industry, ix, 161, 162, 164 
Inert matter and action, 96, 136, 
141, 155, 187, 198, 225, 367 

in Aristotle, 316, 327, 353 

bodies, 7, 8, 12, 14, 20, 21, 156, 
159, 174, 186, 188, 189, 204, 
213, 215, 228, 240, 241, 298, 
300, 341, 342, 346-8, 360 

Creation of. See Inert matter 
the inversion of life 

flux of, 186, 265, 273, 369 

and form, 148, 149, 157, 239, 250 

genesis of, 188 

homogeneity of, 156 

imitation of living matter by, 
33, 35, 36 

imitation of physical order by 
vital, 230 

instantaneity of, 10, 201 

and intellect, ix, 31, 141, 159-62, 
164, 165, 167-8, 175, 179, 181, 
186, 187, 195, 196, 197, 198, 
205-12, 216-9, 224, 264, 270, 
319, 369 

the inversion or interruption of 
life, 93, 94, 98, 99, 128-9, 153, 
177, 186, 189, 190, 196, 197, 201, 
203, 208, 216-9, 231, 235, 236, 
239, 240, 245-50, 252, 254, 256, 
258, 259, 261, 264, 267, 272, 



Inert matter (Continued) 

276, 319, 339-40, 343. See In- 
ert matter, order inherent In 
knowledge of, approximate but 

not relative, 206 
the metaphysics and the phy- 
sics of, 195-6 
as necessity, 252, 264 
the order inherent in, 40, 103, 
153, 201, 207-12, 216, 226-7, 
230-6, 245, 251, 263, 274, 319-20. 
See Inert matter, inversion of 
life 
penetration of, by life, 25, 26, 
51, 179, 181, 237, 239, 266, 270, 
271 
and perception, 12, 206, 226 
and the psychical, 201, 202, 205, 

269, 270, 350, 367 
solidarity of the parts of, 188, 
202, 207, 241, 257-9, 270, 271, 
352 
and space, 10, 153, 189, 204-11. 

214, 244, 250, 251, 257 
in Spencer's philosophy, 365 
Inertia, 176, 224 
Infant, intelligence in, 147, 148 
Inference a beginning of inven- 
tion, 138 
Inferiority in evolutionary rank, 

174-5 
Influence, possible, 11, 189 
Infusoria, conjugation of, 15 
development of the eye from 

its stage in, 60-1, 72, 78, 84 
and individuation, 260 
and mechanical explanations, 

34, 35 
vegetable function in, 116 
Inheritance of acquired charac- 
ters. See Hereditary trans- 
mission 
Innate knowledge, 146-7, 150-1 
Innateness of the categories, 148, 

149-50 
Inorganic matter. See Inert 

matter 
Insectivorous plants, 107-9 
Insects, 19, 101, 107, 126, 131, 134, 
135, 140-1, 146, 147, 157, 166, 
169, 171-5, 188 
apogee of instinct in hymenop- 

tera, 134, 173-4 
consciousness and instinct, 145, 

167, 173 
continuity of instinct with or- 
ganization, 139, 145 
fallibility of instinct in, 172-3 
instinct in general in, 169, 173-4 



INDEX 



389 



Insects ( Continued ) 
language of ants, 157-8 
object of instinct in, 146 
paralyzing instinct in, 146, 171, 

172-3 
social instinct in, 101, 157-8, 171 
special instincts as variations 
on a theme, 167. See Ar- 
thropods in evolution 
Insensible variation, 63, 66 
Inspiration of a poem an un- 
divided intuitive act, con- 
trasted with its intellectual 
imitation in words, 209, 210, 
258. See Sympathy 
Instantaneity of the intellectual 
view, 31, 70, 84, 89, 199, 201-2, 
207, 226, 249, 258, 273, 300-6, 
311, 314, 331-3, 342, 351, 352 
Instinct and action on inert mat- 
ter, 136, 141 
in animals as distinguished 

from plants, 170 
in cells, 166 
and consciousness, 143-5, 166, 

167, 173, 174. 175. 186 
culmination of, in evolution, 

133, 174-5. See Arthropods in 
evolution, Evolutionary su- 
periority 

fallibility of, 173-4 

in insects in general, 169, 173-4 

and intelligence, xii, 51, 100, 
103, 113, 116-8, 132-7, 141-3, 
145, 150, 152, 159, 168-70, 173- 
9, 184-5, 186, 197-8, 238, 246, 
254, 255, 259, 267, 268, 343, 
345, 366 

and intuition, 177, 178-9, 181 

object of, 146-52, 165, 168, 172- 
9, 186, 189, 195, 234, 254 

and organization, 23-4, 138-40, 
145, 166-8, 171-2, 173, 176, 193, 
194, 264 

paralyzing, in certain hymen- 
optera, 146, 171, 172-3 

in plants, 170, 171 

social, of insects, 101, 157-8, 171 
Instinctive knowledge, 148, 167, 

168, 173-4 
learning, 193 
metaphysics, 192, 269, 270, 277 

Instrument, action as, of con- 
sciousness, 180 

animal, is natural; human arti- 
ficial, 139-43 

automatic activity as instru- 
ment of voluntary, 252 

consciousness as, of action, 180 



Instrument (Continued) 

intelligence: the function of in- 
telligence is to construst 
instruments, 159, 192-3 

intelligence transforms life into 
an, 162 

intelligence transforms matter 
into an, 161, 198 

intelligence: the instruments of 
intelligence are artificial, ix, 
137-9, 140-1, 150-1 

natural or organized instru- 
ments of instinct, 140-1, 145, 
150 
Intellect and action, ix, 11, 29, 
44-8, 93, 136, 142, 152-7, 162, 
179, 186, 187, 192, 195, 197-8, 
219, 220, 226-9, 251, 270, 273, 
297-9, 301, 302, 306, 329, 346-7 

in animals, 187 

Fichte's conception of the, 189, 
190, 357 

function of the, 5, 11, 12, 44- 
50, 92, 93, 126, 137-45, 149-60, 
162-4, 168, 174, 176, 181, 187- 
99, 204-8, 214-9, 229, 233, 237, 
241, 242, 246, 247, 251, 270, 290, 
298, 299, 328, 336, 337, 341, 342, 
347, 348 356, 357 

genesis of the, xi-xv, 49, 103, 
104-5, 126-7, 152, 153, 186, 187, 
189, 193, 194, 195, 198, 207, 
247-9, 358, 359, 366 

as inversion of intuition, 7, 8, 
11, 12, 46, 49, 51, 86, 88-91. 
93, 94, 103-4, 113, 116-8, 129, 
132, 133, 135, 136, 139-43, 145, 
157, 161, 168-80, 181, 183, 184, 
185, 190-204, 207-12, 216-8, 221, 
223, 225-6, 230-3, 235, 236, 238, 
245-52, 254-9, 264, 267-71, 276, 
277, 313, 330, 339, 342-5, 361, 
369 

and language, 4, 148, 158-60, 
258, 265, 292, 303, 304, 312, 
313, 326 

and matter, ix-xv, 10, 11, 48-9, 
92, 135, 136, 141, 142, 152-4, 
155, 160, 161, 165, 168, 175, 179, 
181, 182, 186-7, 190, 193, 194, 
195, 198, 199, 201-4, 205-10, 213, 
215, 218-20, 224, 225-30, 240-2, 
245, 246, 248-52, 254, 256-9, 
264, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 297- 
8, 306, 319, 321, 329, 340. 341- 
3, 347-9, 355, 358-61, 368, 369 

mechanism of the, ix-xv, 4, 30, 
32, 47-9, 70, 84-5, 88-9, 101, 
137-8, 150-5, 156-7, 160, 161, 



390 



INDEX 



Intellect (Continued) 

164, 165, 167, 168, 173, 174, 
176, 177, 186, 187, 190-3, 194- 
218, 223-40, 244, 246-7, 249-51, 
254, 255, 257, 258, 266, 270, 
273, 276-7, 292, 300-21, 325, 
329, 330, 332, 337, 338, 339, 
341-8, 351, 358-9, 361-2, 363- 
4, 365, 367 
object of the, ix-xv, 7, 8, 10, 
17, 20, 21, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 
46-9, 52, 71, 74, 84, 87-92, 93, 
95, 102, 103, 139, 140, 149, 152- 
66, 168, 173, 175-9, 180, 181, 
186, 190, 193-211, 213, 216-20, 
223, 224, 226, 228-30, 233, 237, 
238, 240, 245, 249-51, 254, 255, 
257-9, 261, 264, 265, 270, 271, 
273, 274, 298-314, 318-22, 326, 

328, 329, 332-8, 342, 344-9, 351, 
352-7, 359-61, 363, 365, 369-70 

and perception, 4-5, 11, 12, 93- 
4, 161-2, 168, 176-7, 188, 189, 
205, 207, 226-7, 228-9, 230, 238, 
249-51, 273, 299-300, 301, 306, 
359-60 

and rhythm, 299, 300-1, 306-7, 

329, 337, 346-7 

and science, 8-12, 31, 92-3, 152, 
153, 157-8, 159, 160-1, 162-3, 
168, 173-6, 187, 193-8, 202, 204, 
207-9, 214-6, 217, 225-6, 228- 
9, 241, 251, 270, 273, 297-8, 
306, 321, 322, 329, 333-5, 345, 
346-8, 354, 356, 357, 359-60, 
362-3, 369-70 

and space, 10-11, 154, 156-7, 160- 
3, 174-5, 176-7, 189, 202-4, 207- 
12, 215, 218, 222-3, 244, 245, 
250, 251, 257-8, 361-2 

and time, 4, 8-9, 17, 18, 20-2, 36, 
39, 45-6, 47, 51, 163, 300, 301, 
331-2, 335-7, 341 

possibility of transcending the, 
xii, xiii, 48, 152, 177-8, 193-4, 
198-200, 205-6, 207-8, 266, 360- 
1. See Philosophy, Intelli- 
gence 
Intellectualism, hesitation of 
Descartes between, and in- 
tuitionism, 345 
Intelligence and action, 137-41, 
150, 154-5, 161, 162-3, 181, 189, 
198, 306 

animal, 138, 187, 188, 212 

categories of, x, 48, 195-6 

of the child, 147-8 

and consciousness, 187 

culmination of, 130, 139-40, 174- 



Intelligence (.Continued) 

5. See Superiority 
genesis of, 136, 177-8, 366 
and the individual, 251 
and instinct, 109, 135, 136. 141, 

142, 168-70, 173-7, 179, 186, 197, 

209, 238, 259, 267 
in Kant's philosophy, 357-8 
and laws, 229-30 
limitations of, 152 
and matter, 152, 159-60, 161-2, 

175, 179, 181, 186, 189, 194-8, 
230, 237, 250, 369, 370 

mechanism of, 152, 153, 164, 166 
and motion, 153, 159-60, 274, 

303-7, 312, 313, 329 
object of, 145-56, 161, 162, 175, 

179, 250 
practical nature of, ix-xv, 137- 
9, 141, 150-1, 247-8, 305, 306, 
328-9 
and reality, ix-xv, 161-2, 177. 

237, 251, 258, 269, 271, 307 
and science, 175, 176, 193, 194-5 
and signs, 157, 158, 159, 160 
and space, 205 

See Intellect, Understanding, 
Reason 
Intelligent, the, contrasted with 

the merely intelligible, 175 
Intelligible reality in ancient phi- 
losophy, 316-7 
world, 160-1 
Intelligibles of Plotinus, 353 
Intension of knowledge, 149-50 
Intensity of consciousness varies 
with ratio of possible to real 
action, 144-5 
Intention as contrasted with 
mechanism, 233. See Auto- 
matic order, Willed order 
of life the object of instinct. 

176, 233 

Interaction, universal, 188-9 

Interest as cause of variation, 131 
in representation of "nought," 
296, 297. See Affection, rfile 
of, etc. 

Internal finality, 41 

Internality of instinct, 168, 174- 
5, 176-7 
of subject in object the condi- 
tion of knowledge of reality, 
307, 317, 358-9 

Interpenetration, 161, 162, 174-5, 

177, 184 note, 188, 189, 201-3, 
207-8, 257, 258, 270, 319-20, 
341, 352 

Interruption, materiality an, of 



INDEX 



391 



positivity, 219, 246, 247-8, 319- 
20. See Inverse relation, etc. 
Interval of time, 8-9, 22, 23 

between what is done and what 
might be done covered by 
consciousness, 179 
Intuition, continuity between sen- 
sible and ultra-intellectual, 
360-1 

dialectic and, in philosophy, 
238. See Intellect as inver- 
sion of intuition 

fringe of, around the nucleus 
of intellect, xiii, 12, 46, 49, 
193 

and instinct, 176-9, 182 

and intellect in theoretical 
knowlege, 176-9, 270-1. 
Intuitional cosmology as reversed 
psychology, 207-8 

metaphysics contrasted with in- 
tellectual or systematic, 191-2, 
268-70, 277-8 

method of philosophy, apparent 
vicious circle of, 191-4, 195- 
8 
Intuitionism in Spinoza, 347-8 

and intellectualism in Des- 
cartes, 345-6 
Invention, consciousness as, and 
freedom, 264, 270-1 

creativeness of, 164, 237, 340, 
341 

disproportion between, and its 
consequences, 181, 182-3 

duration as, 10-1 

evolution as, 102-3, 255, 344-5 

fervor of, 164 

indivisibility of, 164 

inference a beginning of, 138 

mechanical, 142-3, 194-5 

of steam engine as epoch-mark- 
ing, 138-9 

time as, 341 

unforeseeableness of, 164 

upspringing of, 164 

See New 
Inverse relation of the physical 
and psychical, 126-7, 143-4, 
145, 173-4, 177-8, 201, 202, 206- 
7, 208, 210-1, 212, 217, 218, 222, 
223, 236, 240, 245, 246, 247-8, 
249, 256, 257, 261, 264, 265, 
270, 319-20 
Irreversibility of duration. See 

Repetition 
Isolated systems of matter, 204, 
213, 215, 241, 242, 341, 342, 
346, 347-8. See Bodies 



Janet, Paul, 60-1 note 

Jennings, 35 note 

Jourdain and the two kinds of 

order, 221 
Juxtaposition, 207-8, 338, 339, 

341. Cf. Succession 

Kaleidoscopic variation, 74 
Kant, antinomies of, 204-5, 206 

becoming in Kant's successors, 
362 

coincidence of matter with 
space in Kant's philosophy, 
206, 207-8, 244 

construction the method of 
Kant's successors, 364-5 

his criticism of pure reason, 
205, 287 note, 356-62, 364 

degrees of being in Kant's suc- 
cessors, 362-3 

duration in Kant's successors, 
362-3 

intelligence in Kant's philoso- 
phy, 230, 357 

ontological argument in Kant's 
philosophy, 285 

space and time in Kant's phil- 
osophy, 204-6 

and Spencer, 364 

See Mind and matter, Sensuous 
manifold, Thing-in-itself 
Kantianism, 358, 364 
Katagenesis, 34 
Kepler, 228-9, 332-5 
Knowledge and. action, 150, 193-4, 
196, 197, 206-7, 208, 218 

criticism of, 193-4 

discontinuity of, 306 

extension of, 149 

form of, 148, 194-5, 358-362 

formal, 152 

genesis of, 190 

innate or natural, 146-50 

instinct in, 143, 144, 166-9, 173, 
177, 192-3, 198, 268 

intellect in, ix-xv, 48, 149, 162- 
4, 177, 179, 193-4, 196-9, 206-7, 
208, 218, 237, 238, 251, 270, 
305, 306, 312, 313, 315, 317, 
325, 331-2, 342, 343, 347-8, 359- 
60, 361 

intension of, 149-50 

of reality viewed as the intern- 
ality of subject in object, 
307, 317, 358-9 

intuition and intellect in theo- 
retical knowledge, 174-7, 179, 
238, 270, 342-4 

matter of, 194-5, 357-8, 359-62 



392 



INDEX 



Knowledge (Continued) 
of matter, xi, 48, 206-7, 360-1 
object of, ix-xv, 1, 48, 147, 148, 

159-60, 163, 164, 197-9, 270, 

342, 359-60 
fundamental problem of, 273-5 
as relative to certain require- 
ments of the mind, 152, 190- 

1, 230 
scientific, 193-4, 196-8, 206, 207, 

218 
theory of, xiii, 177, 179, 197, 

204-5, 207-8, 229, 231 
unconscious, 142-6, 146, 150,. 165, 

166 
alleged unknowableness of the 

thing-in-itself, 205, 206 
Kunstler, 260 note 

Labbe, 260 note 

Labor, division of, 99, 110, 118, 

140, 157, 166, 260 
Lalande, Andre, 246 note 
Lamarck, 75-6 

Lamarckism, 75-6, 77, 84-87 
Language, 4, 147, 157-60, 258, 265, 

293, 302-3, 305, 312-4, 320 
La Place, 38 
Lapsed intelligence, instinct as, 

169, 175 
Larvae, 19, 140, 145-66, 172-3 
Latent geometrism of intellect, 

194, 211-2 
Law of correlation, 66, 67 
and genera, 226-9, 330 
heliocentric radius-vector in 

Kepler's laws, 334 
imprint of relations and laws 
upon consciousness in Spen- 
cer's philosophy, 188 
and intuitional philosophy, 176-7 
physical, contrasted with the 

laws of our codes, 218-9 
physical, expression of the neg- 
ative movement, 218 
physical, mathematical form of, 

218, 219, 229-30, 241 
relation as, 228, 229-30 
Learning, instinctive, 192, 193 
Le Dantec, 18 note 
Leibniz, cause in, 277 
dogmatism of, 356, 357 
extension in, 351, 352 
God in, 351, 352, 356 
mechanism in, 348, 351, 355, 

356 
his philosophy a systematization 

of physics, 347 
space in, 351-2 



Leibniz (Continued) 
teleology in, 39, 40 
time in, 352, 362 
Lepidoptera, 114 note, 134 
Le Roy, Ed., 218 note 
Liberation of consciousness, 183-4, 

265, 266 
Liberty. See Freedom 
Life as activity, 128-9, 246 

cause in the realm of, 94, 164, 

complementarity of the powers 

of, ix-xv, 25-6, 27, 51-5, 

97-105, 110, 113, 116-9, 126- 

7, 131-6, 140-3, 176, 177, 183, 
184, 246, 254-7, 266, 270, 343, 
344-5 

consciousness co-extensive with, 
186, 257, 270, 362-3 

mutual contingency of the or- 
ders of life and matter, 235 

continuity of, 1-11, 29, 30, 162, 
163, 258 

as creation, 57-8, 161-2, 223, 
230, 246, 247-8, 252, 254, 255 

symbolized by a curve, 31, 89, 
90 

embryonic, 166 

and finality, 44, 89, 164, 185, 222- 
3 

fluidity of, 153, 165, 191-2, 193 

as free, 129-30 

function of, 93-4, 106-10, 113, 
114, 117, 120, 121, 126-7, 173-5, 
246, 254-6 

harmony of the realm of, 50, 51, 
103, 116, 117-8, 127 

imitation of the inert by, 230 

imitation of, by the inert, 33-6 

impulse of, prolonged in our 
will, 239 

and individuation, 12-4, 26, 27, 
79-80, 85, 87, 88, 127-8, 149, 
195-6, 230, 231, 250, 259, 261, 
269, 300-1, 302-3. See Individ- 
uality 

indivisibility of, 225-6, 270 

and instinct, 136-40, 145, 165-8, 
170, 172, 173, 175-9, 186, 192-7, 
233, 264, 366 

and intellect, ix-xv, 13, 32-5, 
44-9, 89, 101, 102-3, 104-5, 127, 
136, 152, 160-5, 168, 173-4, 176- 
9, 181, 191-201, 206, 207, 213, 
220, 222-3, 224, 225-6, 257-61, 
266, 270, 300-1, 342, 355, 359- 
61, 365, 366 

and interpenetration, 271 

as inversion of the inert, 6-7, 

8, 176, 177, 186, 190, 191, 196, 



INDEX 



393 



Life (Continued) 

197, 201, 202, 207, 208-9, 210-1, 
212, 216, 217, 218, 222-3, 225-6, 
232, 235, 236, 238, 239, 245-50, 
264, 329-31 

a limited force, 126, 127, 141, 
148, 149, 254 

and memory, 167 

penetrating matter, 26, 27, 52, 
179, 181, 182, 237, 239, 266, 
269-70 

as tendency to mobility, 128, 131, 
132 

and physics and chemistry, 31, 
33, 35, 36, 225-6 

in other planets, 256 

as potentiality, 258 

repetition in, and in the inert, 
224, 225, 230, 231 

sinuousness of, 71, 98, 99, 102, 
112, 113, 116, 129-30, 212 

social, 138, 140, 157-8, 265 

in other solar systems, 256 

and evolution of species, 247-8, 
254, 269 

theory of, and theory of know- 
ledge, xii, 177, 179, 197 

unforeseeableness of, 6, 8-9, 20, 
26-7, 28, 29, 37, 45-6, 47, 48, 
52, 86, 96, 163, 164, 184, 223-4, 
249, 339, 341 

unity of, 250, 268, 270 

as a wave flowing over matter, 
251, 266 

See Impulse of, Organic sub- 
stance, Organism, Organiza- 
tion, Vital impetus, Vital or- 
der, Vital principle, Vitalism, 
Willed order 
Limitations of instinct and of in- 
telligence, 152 
Limitedness of the scope of Gali- 
leo's physics, 357, 370 

of the vital impetus, 126, 127, 
141, 148, 149, 255 
Linden, Maria von, 114 note 
Lingulae illustrating failure to 

evolve, 102 
Lizards, color variation in, 72, 74 
Locomotion and consciousness, 
108, 111, 115, 261. See Mobil- 
ity, Movement 
Logic and action, ix, 44, 46, 162, 
179 

formal, 292 

genesis of, x-xi, xiii-xiv, 49, 
103, 104-5, 136, 191-2, 193, 301, 
359, 366 

and geometry, ix, 161, 176, 212 



Logic (Continued) 

impotent to grasp life, x, 13, 32, 
35, 36, 46-9, 89, 101, 152, 162-5, 
194-201, 205, 206, 213, 219, 220, 
222, 223, 225-6, 256-61, 266, 
270, 313, 355, 360-1, 365 
natural, 161, 194-5 
of number, 208 
and physics, 319-20, 321 
and time, 4, 277 
See Intellect, Intelligence, Un- 
derstanding, Order, mathe- 
matical 
Logical existence contrasted with 
psychical and physical, 277, 
298, 328, 361-2 
categories, x, 48, 195, 196 
and physical contrasted, 276-7 
Logik, by Sigwart, 287 note 
XoYOS, hi Plotinus, 210 note 
Looking backward, the attitude 

of intellect, 46, 237 
Lumbriculus, 13 

Machinery and intelligence, 141 
Machines, natural and artificial, 
139. See Implement, Instru- 
ment 

organisms, for action, 252, 254, 
300-1 
Magnitude, certainty of induction 
approached as factors ap- 
proach pure magnitudes, 215- 
16 

and modern science, 333, 335 
Man in evolution, attention, 184 

brain, 183, 184, 263-5 

consciousness, 139-43, 180, 181, 
183, 185, 187, 188, 191-2, 212, 
262-8 

goal, 134, 174-5, 185, 266, 267, 
269, 270 

habit and invention, 265 

intelligence, 133, 137-9, 143, 146, 
174, 175, 187, 188, 212, 266, 267 

language, 158 
Manaceine (de), 124 note 
Manufacture, the aim of intellect, 
137, 138, 145, 152-4. 159-65, 
181, 191, 192, 199, 251, 298 

and organization, 92, 93, 126-7, 
139-43, 150 

and repetition, 44, 45, 155-8 

See Construction, Solid, Utility 
Many and one, categories inap- 
plicable to life, x, 162-3, 177- 
8, 257, 261, 268 

in the idea of individuality, 258 

See Multiplicity 



394 



INDEX 



Martin, J., 102 note 
Marion, 107 note 
Material knowledge, 152 
Materialists, 240 

Materialty the inversion of spirit- 
uality, 212 
Mathematical order. See Inert 

matter, Order 
Matter. See Inert matter 
Maturation as creative evolution, 

47-8, 230 
Maupas, 35 note 

Measurement a human conven- 
tion, 218, 242 
of real time an illusion, 336- 
40 
Mechanical account of action af- 
ter the fact, 47 
cause, x, 34, 35, 40, 44, 177, 234, 

235 
procedure of intellect, 165 
invention, 138, 140, 194-5 
necessity, 47, 215, 216, 218, 236, 
252, 265, 270, 327 
Mechanics of transformation, 32 
Mechanism, cerebral, 252, 253, 262, 
263, 265, 366. See Cerebral 
activity and consciousness 
of the eye, 88 
instinct as, 176-7 
of intellect. See Intellect, 

mechanism of 
and intention, 233. See Auto- 
matic order, Willed order 
life more than, x, xiv note, 78- 
9 
Mechanistic philosophy, xii, xiv, 
17, 29, 30, 37, 74, 88-96, 101, 
102, 194-5, 218, 223, 264, 345, 
346, 347, 348, 351, 355, 356, 
362 
Medical philosophers of the eigh- 
teenth century, 356 
science, 165 
Medullary bulb in the develop- 
ment of the nervous system, 
252 
and consciousness, 110 
Memory, 5, 17, 20, 21, 167, 168, 180, 

181, 201 
Menopause in illustration of 

crisis of evolution, 19 
Mental life, unity of, 268 
Metamorphoses of larvae, 139-40, 

146-7, 166 
Metaphysics and duration, 276 
and epistemology, 177, 179, 185, 

197, 208-9 
Galileo's influence on, 20, 238 



Metaphysics ( Continued) 

instinctive, 191-2, 269, 270, 277- 
8 

and intellect, 189-90 

and matter, 194 

natural, 21, 325 

and science, 176-7, 194-5, 198, 
208-9, 344, 354, 369-70 

systematic, 191, 192, 194, 195- 
6, 238, 269, 270, 347 
Metchnikoff, 18 note 
Method of philosophy, 191-2 
Microbes, illustrating divergence 

of tendency, 117 
Microbial colonies, 259 
Mind, individual, in philosophy, 
191 

and intellect, 48-9, 205-6 

knowledge as relative to cer- 
tain requirements of the 
mind, 152, 190-1, 230 

and matter, 188-9, 201, 202, 203, 
205-6, 264, 269, 270, 350, 365-9 

See Psychic, Psycho-physio- 
logical parallelism, Psychol- 
ogy and Philosophy, (pv^lj 
Minot, Sedgwick, 17 note 
Mobility, tendency toward, char- 
acterizes animals, 109, 110, 
113, 129-32, 135, 180 

and consciousness, 108, 111, 115- 
6, 261 

and intellect, 154-5, 161-2, 163, 
300, 326, 327, 337 

of intelligent signs, 158, 159 

life as tendency toward, 127-8, 
131, 132 

in plants, 112, 135 

See Motion 
Mobius, 60 note 

Model necessary to the construc- 
tive work of intellect, 164, 
166-7 
Modern astronomy compared with 
ancient science, 334, 335 

geometry compared with an- 
cient science, 31, 161, 334 

idealism, 231 

philosophy compared with an- 
cient, 225-9, 231, 327-8, 344, 
345, 349-51, 354, 356-7 

philosophy: parallelism of body 
and mind in, 180, 350, 355, 
356 

science: cinematographical char- 
acter of, 329, 330, 336, 341, 342, 
346-7 

science compared with ancient, 
329-36, 342-5, 356-7 



INDEX 



395 



Modern (Continued) 
science, Galileo's influence on, 

334, 335 
science, Kepler's influence on, 

334 
science, magnitudes the object 

of, 333, 335 
science, time an independent 
variable in, 20, 335 
Molecules, 251 

Molluscs, illustrating animal ten- 
dency to mobility, 129-31 
perception in, 189 
vision in, 60, 75, 77, 83, 86, 87 
Monads of Leibniz, 351-4 
Monera, 126 
Monism, 355 

Moral sciences, weakness of de- 
duction in, 212 
Morat, 123 note 
Morgan, L., 79 note, 80 
Motion, abstract, 304 
articulations of, 310-1 
an animal characteristic, 252 
and the cinematograph, 304-5 
continuity of, 310 
in Descartes, 346-7 
evolutionary, extensive and 

qualitative, 302, 303, 311, 312 
in general (i.e. abstract), 304-5 
indivisibility of, 306-7, 311, 336- 

7, 338 
and instinct, 139-40, 331-2 
and intellect, 71, 155, 156, 159- 
60, 273, 274, 298, 317-8, 321, 
329, 331-2, 338, 344-5 
organization of, 310-1 
track laid by motion along its 

course, 308-11, 337, 338 
See Mobility, Movement 
Motive principle of evolution: 

consciousness, 181-2 
Motor mechanisms, cerebral, 252, 

253, 263, 265 
Moulin-Quignon, quarry of, 137 
Moussu, 81 

Movement and animal life, 108, 

131 132 

ascending, 12, 101, 103, 104, 185, 

208-9, 210-1, 369-70. See Vital 

impetus 

consciousness and, 111, 118, 144- 

5, 207-8 
descending, 11-2, 202-4, 207-10, 
212, 246, 252, 256, 270, 276, 
339, 361, 369-70 
goal of, the object of the intel- 
lect, 155, 299-300, 302, 303 
intellect unable to grasp, 313 



Movement (Continued) 

mutual inversion of cosmic 
movements, 126-7, 143, 144, 
173-4, 176, 177, 209-10, 212, 
217, 218, 222-3, 236, 245-51, 
261, 264, 265, 272, 342-3 
life as, 166, 176-7 
and the nervous system, 110, 

132, 134, 180, 262-3 
of plants, 109, 135-6 
See Mobility, Motion, Locomo> 
tion, Current, Tendency, Im- 
petus, Impulse, Impulsion 
Movements, antagonistic cosmic, 
128-9, 135, 181, 185, 250, 259. 
See Movement, Mutual inver- 
sion of cosmic 
Multiplicity, abstract, 257, 259 
distinct, 202, 209-10, 257. See 

Interpenetration 
does not apply to life, x, 162, 
177. 257, 261, 270 
Mutability, exhaustion of, of the 

universe, 244, 245 
Mutations, sudden, 28, 62-3, 64-8 
theory of, 85-6 

Natural geometry, 195-6, 211-2 
instrument, 141, 144-5, 150-1 
or innate knowledge, 147, 150-1 
logic, 161, 194-5 
metaphysic, 21, 325-6 
selection, 54, 56-7, 59-60, 61-5, 

68, 95, 169-70 
Nature, Aristotelian theory of, 

135, 174 
discord in, 127-8, 255, 267 
facts and relations in, 368 
incoherence in, 104 
as inert matter, 161-2, 218, 219, 

228-9, 239, 245, 264, 280-1, 

303, 356, 359-60, 367 
as life, 100, 138, 139-40, 141-2, 

143, 144-5, 150, 154, 155-6. 

227, 241, 260, 269, 270, 301-2 
order of, 225-6 
as ordered diversity, 231, 233 
unity of, 105, 190, 191, 195, 196- 

9, 322, 352-7, 358 
Nebula, cosmic, 249, 257 
Necessity for creation, vital im- 
petus as, 252, 261 
and death of individuals, 246 

note 
and freedom, 218, 236, 270 
in Greek philosophy, 326-7 
in induction, 215, 216 
and matter, 252, 264 
Negation, 275, 285-97. See 

Nought 



396 



INDEX 



Negative cause of mathematical 
order, 217. See Inverse re- 
lation, etc. 
cosmic principle, 126-7, 143, 144, 
173-4, 176-7, 209, 212, 218, 223- 
4, 236, 245-51, 261, 264-5, 272, 
243. See Inert matter, Oppo- 
sition of the two ultimate 
cosmic movements, etc. 

Neo-Darwinism, 55, 56, 85, 86, 
169-70 

Neo-Lamarckism, 42 note 

Nervous system a centre of ac- 
tion, 109, 130-1, 132, 134-5, 
180, 253, 261-3 
of the plant, 114 
primacy of, 120-1, 126-7, 252 

Neurone and indetermination, 126 

New, freedom and the, 11-2, 164, 
165, 199-200, 218, 230, 239, 249, 
270, 339-42 

Newcomen, 184 

Newton, 335 

Nitrogen and the function of or- 
ganisms, 108, 113-4, 117, 255 

V07)O£(OS vdTjGCS Of Aristotle, 356 

Non-existence. See Nought 

Nothing. See Nought 

Nought, conception of the, 273- 
80, 281-3, 289-90, 292-8, 316-7, 
327. See Negation, Pseudo- 
ideas, etc. 

voOs TZOlt)TCK.6s of Aristotle, 322 

Novelty. See new. 

Nucleus intelligence as the lumi- 
nous, enveloped by instinct, 
166-7 
in microbial colonies, 259 
intelligence as the solid, bathed 
by a mist of instinct, 193, 194 
of Stentor, 260 

Number illustrating degrees of 
reality, 324-5, 327 
logic of, 208 

Nuptial flight, 146 

Nutritive elements, fixation of, 
107-9, 114, 117, 246, 247, 254 

Nymph (Zool.), 139, 146 

Object of this book, ix-xv 
of instinct, 146-52, 163, 175-9 
of intellect, 146-52, 161-5, 175, 
179, 190-1, 199-200, 237, 250, 
252, 270, 273, 298-304, 307-8, 
311-2, 354, 359 
internality of subject in, the 
condition of knowledge of re- 
ality, 307-8, 317-8, 359 
of knowledge, 147, 148-9, 159-60 
idea of, contrasted with that 



Object (Continued) 

of universal interaction, 11, 
188-9, 207-8 

of philosophy as contrasted 
with object of science, 195-6, 
220-1, 225-6, 227, 239, 251, 270, 
273, 297-9, 305-6, 347 

of science, 329, 332-3, 335-6 
Obliteration of outlines in the 

real, 11, 188, 189, 207-8 
Oenothera Lamarckiana, 63, 85-6 
Old, growing. See Age 

the, is the object of the intel- 
lect, 163, 164, 199, 270 
One and many in the idea of in- 
dividuality, x, 258. See Unity 
Ontological argument in Kant, 

284 
Opposition of the two ultimate 
cosmic movements, 128-9, 175- 
6, 179, 186, 201, 203, 238, 248, 
254, 259, 261, 267. -See In- 
verse relation of the physi- 
cal and psychical 
Orchids, instincts of, 170 
Order and action, 226-7 

complementarity of the two or- 
ders, 145-6, 173-4, 221-2. See 
Order, Mutual inversion of 
the two orders 

mutual contingency of the two 
orders, 231, 235 

and disorder, 40, 103-4, 220-2, 
225-6, 231-6, 274 

mutual inversion of the two 
orders, 186, 201, 202, 206-9, 
211, 212, 216-8, 219-21, 222-3, 
225-6, 230, 232, 235, 236, 238, 
240, 245-8, 256, 257, 258, 264, 
270, 274, 313, 330 

mathematical, 153, 209-11, 217- 
9, 223-6, 230-3, 236, 245, 251, 
270, 330-1 

of nature, 225-6, 231, 233 

as satisfaction, 222, 223, 274 

vital, 94-5, 164, 222-7, 230, 235, 
236, 237, 330-1 

willed, 224, 239 
Organ and function, 88-91, 93-4, 

95, 132, 140, 141, 157, 161-2 
Organic destruction and physico- 
chemistry, 226 

substance, 131, 140, 141-2, 149, 
162-3, 195-6, 240 note, 255, 267 

world, cleft between, and the 
inorganic, 190, 191, 196, 197-S 

world, harmony of, 50-1, 103, 
104, 116, 118, 126-7 

world, instinct the procedure 
of, 165 



INDEX 



397 



Organism and action, 123-4, 125, 
174, 253, 254, 300-1 

ambiguity of primitive, 99, 112, 
113, 116, 129, 130 

association of organisms, 260 

change and the, 301, 302-3 

complementarity of intelligence 
and instinct in the, 141-2, 150, 
181, 184, 185 

complexity of the, 162, 250, 252, 
253, 260 

consciousness and the, 111, 
145, 179, 180, 262, 270 

contingency of the actual chem- 
ical nature of the, 255, 257 

differentiation of parts in, 252, 
260. See Organism, complex- 
ity of 

extension of, by artificial in- 
struments, 141, 161 

freedom the property of every, 
130, 131 

function of, 26, 27, 79, 80, 85, 
87, 88, 93-4, 106-110, 113, 114, 
117, 120, 121, 126-7, 12S, 136, 
173-5, 230, 231, 246, 247, 250, 
251, 254, 255, 256, 258, 270 

function and structure, 55, 61, 
62, 69, 74, 75, 76-7, 86, 88-91, 
93-4, 95, 96-7, 11S-9, 132, 139, 
140, 157-8, 161-3, 250, 252, 256 

generality typified by similar- 
ity among organisms, 223, 
224, 228-9, 230 

hive as, 166 

and individuation, x, 12, 13, 15, 
23, 26-7, 42, 149, 195-6, 225-6, 
228-9, 259, 260, 261, 270 

mutual interpenetration of or- 
ganisms, 177-8 

mechanism of the, 31, 92-3, 94 

philosophy and the, 195-6 

unity of the, 176-8 
Organization of action, 142, 145, 
147-8, 150, 181, 184, 185 

of duration, 5-6, 15, 25, 26 

explosive character of, 92 

and instinct, 24, 138-46, 150, 
165-7, 171-2, 173, 176, 192-3, 
194, 264 

and intellect, 161-2 

and manufacture, 92, 93, 94-5, 
96, 126-8 

is the modus vivendi between 
the antagonistic cosmic cur- 
rents, 181, 250, 254 

of motion, 310 

and perception, 226-7 
Originality of the willed order, 
224 



Orthogenesis, 69, 86-7 
Oscillation between association 
and individuation, 259, 261. 
See Societies 
of ether, 301-2 
of instinct and intelligence 

about a mean position, 136 
of pendulum, illustrating space 
and time in ancient philoso- 
phy, 318-9, 320 
between representation of inner 

and outer reality, 279-80 
of sensible reality in ancient 
philosophy about being, 316-8 
Outlines of perception the plan of 
action, 5, 11, 12, 93, 188, 189, 
204-5, 206-7, 226-7, 228-9, 230, 
250, 299-300, 306 
Oxygen, 114, 254, 255 

Paleontology, 24-5, 129, 139 

Paleozoic era, 102 

Parallelism, psycho-physiological, 

180, 350, 351, 355, 356 
Paralyzing instinct in hymenop- 
tera, 139-40, 146, 172, 174-5 
Parasites, 106, 108, 109, 111-13, 

134-5 
Parasitism, 132 
Passivity, 222-4 
Past, subsistence of, in present, 

4, 20-3, 26-7, 108, 199-202 
Peckham, 173-4 note 
Pecten, illustrating identical 
structures in divergent lines 
of evolution, 62, 63, 75 
Pedagogical and social nature of 

negation, 287-97 
Pedagogy and the function of the 

intellect, 165 
Penetration, reciprocal, 161-2. See 

Interpenetration 
Perception and action, 4-5, 11, 12, 
93, 188, 189, 206, 226-7, 228-9, 
300-1, 306-7 
and becoming, 176-7, 303-6 
cinematographical character of, 

206-7, 249, 251, 331-2 
distinctness of, 226-7, 250 
and geometry, 205, 230 
in molluscs, 188 
and organization, 226-7 
prolonged in intellect, 161-2, 273 
reaction in, 264 
and recollection, 180, 181 
refracts reality, 204, 238, 359-60 
rhythm of, 299-300, 301 
and science, 168 
Permanence an illusion, 299-301 



398 



INDEX 



Peron, 80 

Perrier, Ed., 260 note 
Personality, absolute reality of, 
269 
concentration of, 201, 202 
and matter, 269, 270 
the object of intuition, 268 
tension of, 199, 200, 201 
Perthes, Boucher de, 137 
Phaedrus, 156 note 
Phagocytes and external finality, 

42 
Phagocytosis and growing old, 18 
Phantom ideas and problems, 177, 

277, 283, 296 
Philosophical explanation con- 
trasted with scientific explan- 
ation, 168 
Philosophy and art, 176-7 
and biology, 43-4, 194-6 
and experience, 197-8 
function of 29-30, 84-5, 93-4, 
168, 173-4, 194-7, 198, 268, 
269, 369-70 
history of, 238 

Incompletely conscious of it- 
self, 207-8, 209 
individual mind in, 191 
and intellect, ix-xv 
intellect and intuition in, 238 
of intuition, 176-7, 191-4, 196, 

197, 277 
method of, 191-2, 194, 195, 239 
object of, 239 
and the organism, 195-6 
and physics, 194, 208 
and psychology, 194, 196 
and science, 175, 196-7, 208, 345, 

370 
Bee Ancient philosophy, Cos- 
mology, Finalism, Mechanis- 
tic philosophy, Metaphysics, 
Modern philosophy, Post- 
Kantian philosophy 
Phonograph illustrating "unwind- 
ing" cause, 73 
Phosphorescence, consciousness 

compared to, 262 
Photograph, illustrating the na- 
ture of the intellectual view 
of reality, 31, 304-5 
Photography, instantaneous, il- 
lustrating the mechanism of 
the intellect, 331-2, 333 
Physical existence, as contrasted 
with logical, 276, 297-8, 328, 
361 
laws, their precise form artifi- 
cial, 218, 219, 229, 240-1 



Physical {Continued) 

laws and the negative cosmio 

movement, 218 
operations the object of intelli- 
gence, 175, 250 
order, imitation of, by the vital, 

230 
science, 176-7 
Physico-chemistry and organic 

destruction, 226 
and biology, 25-6, 29-30, 34, 35, 

36, 55, 57, 98, .194 
Physics, ancient, "logic spoiled," 

320, 321-2 
of ancient philosophy, 315, 320, 

321-2, 355 
of Aristotle, 228 note, 324 note v 

331, 332 
and deduction, 213 
of Galileo, 357, 369-70 
and individuality of bodies, 188, 

208 
as inverted psychics, 202 
and logic, 319-20, 321 
and metaphysics, 194, 208 
and mutability, 245 
success of, 218, 219 
Pigment-spot and adaptation, 60, 

61, 71-3, 76-7 
and heredity, 83, 84 
Pinguicula, certain animal char- 
acteristics of, 107 
Plan, motionless, of action the 

object of intellect, 155, 298-9, 

301-2, 303 
Planets, life in other, 256 
Plants and animals in evolution, 

105-39, 142-3, 144, 145-6, 147, 

168, 169-70, 181, 182, 183-4, 185, 

254, 267 
complementarity of, to animals, 

183-4, 185, 267 
consciousness of, 109, 111, 113, 

120, 128-35, 142-3, 144, 181. 

182, 292. See Torpor, Sleep 
function of, 107-9, 113, 114, 117, 

246, 247, 254, 256 
function and structure in, 67, 

77-8, 79 
individuation in, 12 
instinct in, 170, 171 
and mobility, 108, 109, 111-13, 

118-9, 129, 130, 135-6 
parallelism of evolution with 

animals, 59-60, 106-8, 116 
supporters of all life, 271 
variation of, 85, 86 
Plasma, continuity of germina- 

tive, 25-6, 42, 7S-83 



INDEX 



399 



Plastic substances, 255 

Plato, 49, 156, 191, 210 note, 316, 
318, 319, 320, 321, 327, 330, 
347 349 

Platonic ideas, 49, 315-6, 321, 322, 
327, 330, 352 

Plotinus, 210 note, 314-5, 323, 324 
note, 349, 352, 353 

Plurality, confused, of life, 257. 
See Interpenetration 

Poem, sounds of, distinct to per- 
ception; the sense indivisible 
to intuition, 209 
illustrating creation of matter, 
240, 319-20 

TZOltytCKQS, VOUS, of Aristotle, 322 

Polymorphism of ants, bees, and 
wasps, 140 
of insect societies, 157 

Polyzoism, 260 

Positive reality, 208, 212. See 
Reality 

Positivity, materiality an inver- 
sion or interruption of, 219, 
246, 247-8, 319-20 

Possible activity as a factor in 
consciousness, 11, 12, 96, 144, 
145, 146-7, 158-9, 165, 179, 180, 
181, 189, 264, 368 
existence, 290, 295 

Post-Kantian philosophy, 362, 363 

Potential activity. See Possible 
activity 
genera, 226 

knowledge, 142-7, 150, 166 

Potentiality, life as an immense, 
258, 270 
zone of, surrounding acts, 179, 
180, 181, 264. See Possible 
activity 

Powers of life, complementarity 
of, xii, xiii, 26, 27, 51-5, 97-105, 
110, 113, 116-8, 119, 126-7, 131- 
6, 140-3, 176, 177, 183, 184, 
246, 254, 255, 257, 266, 270, 
343, 345 

Practical nature of perception and 
its prolongation in intellect 
and science, 137-41, 150, 193- 
4, 196, 197, 206, 207-8, 218, 
247-8, 273, 281, 305, 306-7, 328, 
329 

Preestablished harmony, 205-6, 
207 

Present, creation of, by past, 5, 
20-3, 26-7, 167, 199-202 

Prevision. See Foreseeing 

Primacy of nervous system, 120- 
6, 252 



Primary instinct, 138-9, 168 
(Primitive organisms, ambiguous 
forms of, 99, 112, 113, 116, 129, 
130 
"Procession" in Alexandrian phi- 
losophy, 323 
Progress, adaptation and, 101 ff. 
evolutionary, 50, 133, 134, 138, 
141-2, 173-4, 175, 185, 264-5, 
266 
Prose and verse, illustrating the 

two kinds of orders, 221, 232 
Protophytes, colonizing of, 259 
Protoplasm, circulation of, 32-3, 
108 
and senescence, 18, 19 
imitation of, 32-3, 35 
primitive, and the nervous sys- 
tem, 124, 126-7 
of primitive organisms, 99, 108, 

109 
and the vital principle, 42-3 
Protozoa, association of, 259-61 
ageing of, 16 
of ambiguous form, 112 
and individuation, 14, 259-61 
mechanical explanation of 

movements of, 33 
and nervous system, 126 
reproduction of, 14 
Pseudo-ideas and problems, 177, 

277, 283, 296 
Pseudoneuroptera, division of 

labor among, 140 
(jj'Xyi} of Aristotle, 350 
of Plotinus, 210 note 
Psychic activity, two-fold nature 
of, 136, 140-1, 142-3 
life, continuity of, 1-11, 29-30 
Psychical existence contrasted 
with logical, 276, 297-8, 327- 
8, 361 
nature of life, 257 
Psychics inverted physics, 201, 
202. See Inverse relation of 
the physical and psychical 
Psychology and deduction, 212-3 
and the genesis of intellect, 187, 

194, 195-6, 197 
intuitional cosmology as re- 
versed, 208-9 
Psycho-physiological parallelism, 

180, 350, 351, 355, 356 
Puberty, illustrating crises in 
evolution, 19, 320-1 

Qualitative, evolutionary and ex- 
tensive becoming, 313 
motion, 302-3, 304, 311 






400 



INDEX 



Qualities, acts, forms, the classes 
of representation, 303, 314 
bodies as bundles of, 300-1 
coincidence of, 309 
and movements, 299-300 
and natural ^geometry, 211 
superimposition of, in induc- 
tion, 216 
Quality is change, 299-300 
in Eleatic philosophy, 314-5 
and quantity in ancient phi- 
losophy, 323-4 
and quantity in modern phi- 
losophy, 350 
and rhythm, 300-2 
Quaternary substances, 121 
Quinton, Rene, 134 note 

Radius -vector, Heliocentric, in 

Kepler's laws, 334 
Rank, evolutionary, 50, 133-5, 173- 

4, 265 
Reaction, role of, in perception, 

226-7 
Ready-made categories, x, xiv, 

48, 237, 250, 251, 273, 311, 321, 

329, 354, 359 
Real activity as distinguished 

from possible, 145 
common-sense is continuous ex- 
perience of the, 213 
continuity of the, 302, 329 
dichotomy of the, in modern 

philosophy, 349 
imitation of the , by intelli- 
gence, 90, 204, 258, 270, 307, 

355 
obliteration of outlines in the, 

11-2, 188, 189, 207-8 
representation of the, by 

science, 203-4 
Realism, ancient, 231-2 
Realists and idealists alike as- 
sume possibility of absence of 

order, 220, 231-2 
Reality, absolute, 198, 228-9, 230, 

269, 359-60, 361 
as action, 47, 191-2, 194-5, 249 
degrees of, 323, 327 
in dogmatic metaphysics, 196 
double form of, 179-80, 216, 230- 

1, 236 
as duration, 11-2, 217, 272 
as flux, 165, 250, 251, 294, 337, 

338, 342 
and the frames of the intellect, 

363-4, 365. See Frames of the 

understanding 
as freedom, 247 



Reality (Continued) 

of genera in ancient philoso- 
phy, 226-7 

is growth, 239 

imitation of, by the intellect, 
89-90, 365 

and the intellect, 52, 89-90, 153, 
191, 192, 314-5, 355-6 

intelligible, in ancient philoso- 
phy, 317 

knowledge of, 307-8, 317, 358-9 

and mechanism, 351, 354-5 

as movement, 90, 155, 301-2, 312 

and not-being, 276, 280, 285 

of the person, 269 

refraction of, through the forms 
of perception, 204, 238, 359- 
60 

and science, 194, 196, 198, 199, 
203-4, 206-8, 354, 357 

sensible, in ancient philosophy, 
314, 317, 321, 327, 328, 352 

symbol of, xi, 30-1, 71, 88-9, 
93-4, 195-6, 197, 209, 240, 342, 
360-1, 369 

undefinable conceptually, 13, 
49 

unknowable in Kant, 205 

unknowable in Spencer, xi 

views of, 30-1, 71, 84, 88, 199, 
201, 206-7, 225-6, 249, 258, 273, 
300-7, 311, 314, 331-2, 342, 351, 
352 
Reason and life, 7, 8, 48, 161 

cannot transcend itself, 193-4 
Reasoning and acting, 192-3 

and experience, 203-4 

and matter, 204-5, 208-9 

on matter and life, 7, 8 
Recollection, dependence of, on 
special circumstances, 167, 
180 

in the dream, 202, 207-8 

and perception, 180, 181 
Recommencing, continual, of the 
present in the state of relax- 
ation, 201 
Recomposing, decomposing and, 
the characteristic powers of 
intellect, 157, 251 
Record, false comparison of 

memory with, 5 
Reflection, 158-9 
Reflex activity, 110 

compound, 173-4, 175-6 
Refraction of the idea through 
matter or non-being, 316-7 

of reality through forms of per- 
ception, 204, 238, 359-60 



INDEX 



401 



Regeneration and individuality, 

13, 14 
Register of time, 16, 20, 37 
Reinke, 42 note 

Relation, imprint of relations and 
laws upon consciousness, 188 

as law, 229, 230-1 

and thing, 147-52, 156-7, 160, 
161, 187, 202, 352, 357 
Relativism, epistemological, 196, 

197, 230 
Relativity of immobility, 155 

of the intellect, xi, 48-9, 158, 
153, 187, 195-6, 197-8, 199, 218, 
273, 306-7, 360-1 

of knowledge, 152, 191, 230 

of perception, 226-7, 228, 300-1 
Relaxation in the dream state, 
201, 209-10 

and extension, 201, 207-8, 209, 
210, 212, 218, 223, 245 

and intellect, 200, 207-8, 209, 
212, 218 

logic a, of virtual geometry, 212 

matter a, of unextended into 
extended, 218 

memory vanishes in complete, 
200 

necessity as, of freedom, 218 

present continually recom- 
mences in the state of relaxa- 
tion, 200 

will vanishes in complete, 200, 
207-8 

See Tension 
Releasing cause, 73, 74, 115, 118- 

9, 120 
Repetition and generalization, 
230-1, 232 

and fabrication, 44-5, 46, 155-8 

and intellect, 156-7, 199, 214-6 

of states, 5-6, 7-8, 28-9, 30, 36, 
45-6, 47 

in the vital and in the mathe- 
matical order, 225, 226, 230, 
231 
Representation and action, 143-4, 
145, 180 

classes of: qualities, forms, 
acts, 302-3, 314 

and consciousness, 143-4 

of motion, 159-60, 303-4, 305, 
306-7, 308, 313, 315, 344-5 

of the Nought, 273-80, 281-4, 
289-317, 327 
Represented or internalized ac- 
tion distinguished from ex- 
ternalized action, 144-7, 158- 
9, 165 



Reproduction and individuation, 
13, 14 

Resemblance. See Similarity 

Reservoir, organism a, of energy, 
115, 116, 125-6, 245, 246, 254 

Rest and motion in Zeno, 308-12 

Retrogression in evolution, 133, 
134 

Retrospection the function of in- 
tellect, 47-8, 237 

Reversed psychology: intuitional 
cosmology, 208 

Rhizocephala and animal mobil- 
ity, 111 

Rhumbler, 34 note 

Rhythm of duration, 11-2, 127-8, 
300-1, 345-7 
intelligence adopts the, of ac- 
tion, 305-6 
of perception, 299-300, 301 
and quality, 301 
scanning the, of the universe 
the function of science, 346-7 
of science must coincide with 

that of action, 320 
of the universe untranslatable 
into scientific formulae, 337 

Rings of arthropods, 132-3 

Ripening, creative evolution as, 
47-8, 340-1 

Romanes, 139 

Roule, 27 note 

Roy (Le), Ed., 218 note 

Salamandra maculata, vision in, 
75 

Salensky, 75 note 

Same, function of intellect con- 
necting same with same, 199- 
200, 233, 770 

Samter and Heymons, 72 note 

Saporta (De), 112 note 

Savage's sense of distance and 
direction, 212 

Skepticism or dogmatism the 
dilemma of any systematic 
metaphysics, 195-6, 197, 230-1 

Schisms in the primitive impul- 
sion of life, 254-5, 257. See 
Divergent lines of evolution 

Scholasticism, 370 

Science and action, 93, 195, 198, 
328-9 
ancient, and modern, 329-37, 

342-5, 357 
astronomy, ancient and modern, 

334-5, 336 
cartesian geometry and ancient 
geometry, 333-4 



402 



INDEX 



Science (Continued) 
cinematographical character of 
modern, 329, 330, 336-7, 340- 
1, 342, 345-8 
conventionality of a certain as- 
pect of, 206-7 
and deduction, 212-3 
and discontinuity, 161-2 
function of, 92, 167-8, 173-4, 
176-7, 193-4, 195-6, 198-9, 328- 
9, 346-7 
Galileo's influence on modern, 

333-4, 335 
and instinct, 169, 170, 173-4, 

175, 193-5 
and intelligence, 176, 177, 193-6 
Kepler's influence on modern, 

334 
and matter, 194-5, 206-7, 208 
modern. See Modern science 
object of, 195-6, 220, 221, 251, 
270-1, 273, 296-8, 306-7, 328-9, 
332-3, 335-6, 347-8 
and perception, 168 
and philosophy, 175-6, 196-7, 

208-9, 344, 370 
physical. See Physics 
and reality. See Reality and 

science 
and time, 8-13, 20, 335-8 
unity of, 195-6, 197, 228-9, 230, 
321-2, 323, 344-5, 347-8, 349, 
354, 355-6, 359-60, 362-3 
Scientific concepts, 338-40 

explanation and philosophical 

explanation, 168 
formulae, 337 
geometry, 161, 211 
knowledge, 193-4, 196-7, 198, 
199, 207, 208, 218 
Sclerosis and aging, 19 
Scolia, paralyzing instinct in, 172 
Scope of action indefinitely ex- 
tended by intelligent instru- 
ments, 141 
of Galileo's physics, 357, 370 
Scott, 63 note 

Sea-urchin and individuality, 13 
Seailles, 29 note 
Secondary instincts, 139, 168 
Sectioning of becoming in the 
philosophy of Ideas, 317-8 
of matter by perception, 206-7, 
249, 251 
Sedgwick, 260 note 
Seeing and willing, coincidence 

of, in intuition, 237 
Selection, natural, 54, 56-7, 59- 
60, 61-2, 63, 64, 68, 95-6, 169, 
170 



Self, coincidence of, with, 199 
existence of, means change, 1 

ff. 
knowledge of, 1 ff. 

Senescence, 15-23, 26-7, 42-3 

Sensation and space, 202 

Sense-perception. See Percep- 
tion 

Sensible flux, 316-7, 318, 321, 322, 
327, 343, 345 
intuition and ultra-intellectual, 

360-1 
object, apogee of, 342-3, 344-5, 

349 
reality, 314, 317, 319, 327, 328, 
352 

Sensibility, forms of, 361 

Sensitive plant, in illustration of 
mobility in plants, 109 

Sensori-motor system. See Ner- 
vous system 

Sensuous manifold, 205, 221, 232, 
235, 236 

Sentiment, poetic, in illustration 
of individuation, 258, 259 

Serkovski, 259 note 

Serpula, in illustration of identi- 
cal evolution in divergent 
lines, 96 

Sexual cells, 14, 26, 27, 79-81 

Sexuality parallel in plants and 
animals, 58-60, 119-21 

Shaler, N. S., 133 note, 184 note 

Sheath, calcareous, in illustration 
of animal tendency to mo- 
bility, 130-1 

Signs, function of, 158, 159, 160 
the instrument of science, 329- 
30 

Sigwart, 287 note 

Silurian epoch, failure of certain 
species to evolve since, 102 

Similarity among individuals of 
same species the type of gen- 
erality, 224-6, 228-9, 230-1 
and mechanical causality, 44, 
45 

Simultaneity, to measure time is 
merely to count simultanei- 
ties, 9, 336, 337, 341 

Sinuousness of evolution, 71, 98, 
102, 212-3 

Sitaris, unconscious knowledge 
of, 146, 147 

Situation and magnitude, prob- 
lems of, 211 

Sketching movements, function 
of consciousness, 207-8 

Sleep, 129-31, 135, 181 

Snapshot, in illustration of intel- 
lectual representation of mo- 



INDEX 



403 



Snapshot (Continued) 

tion, 305, 306, 313, 315, 344. 
See View of reality, Cinema- 
tographical character, etc. 
form denned as a, of transition, 
301-2, 317, 318, 321-2, 345 
Social instinct, 101, 140, 158, 171-2 
life, 138, 140, 158, 265 
and pedagogical character of 
negation, 287-97 
Societies, 101, 131-2, 158, 171-2, 

259 
Society and the individual, 260, 

265 
Solar energy stored by plants, re- 
leased by animals, 246, 254 
systems, 241-4, 246 note, 256, 

270 
systems, life in other, 256 
Solid, concepts analogous to 
solids, ix 
intellect as a solid nucleus, 193, 

194 
the material of construction 
and the object of the intel- 
lect, 153, 154, 161, 162, 251 
Solidarity between brain and 
consciousness, 180, 262 
of the parts of matter, 203, 207- 
8, 241, 271 
Solidification operated by the un- 
derstanding, 249 
odb/J.n in Aristotle, 350 
Somnambulism and conscious- 
ness, 144, 145, 159 
Soul and body, 350 
and cell, 269 
creation of, 270 
Space and action, 203 
in ancient philosophy, 318, 319 
and concepts, 160-1, 163, 174-5, 

176-7, 188-9, 257-9 
geometrical, 203 
homogeneity of, 156, 212 
and induction, 216 
in Kant's philosophy, 205, 206, 

207, 244 
in Leibniz's philosophy, 351 
and matter, 189, 202-13, 244, 

257, 264, 361-2, 368 
and time in Kant's philosophy, 

205-6 
unity and multiplicity determi- 
nations of, 357-9 
See Extension 
Spatiality atmosphere of, bath- 
ing intelligence, 205 
degradation of the extra-spa- 
tial, 207 
and distinctness, 203, 207, 244, 
250, 257-9 



Spatiality ( Continued) 

and geometrical space, 203, 211, 

213, 218 
and mathematical order, 208, 
209 
Special instincts and environ- 
ment, 138, 168, 192-3, 194 
and recollections, 167, 168, 180 
as variations on a theme, 167, 
172, 264 
Species, articulate, 133 
evolution of, 247, 255, 269 
and external finality, 128-9, 130- 

1, 132, 266 
fossil, 102 
human, as goal of evolution, 

266, 267 
human, styled homo faoer, 139 
and instinct, 140, 167, 170-2, 

264 
and life, 167 

similarity within, 223-6, 228-9, 
230-1 
Speculation, dead -locks in, xii, 
155, 156, 312, 313-4 
object of philosophy, 44, 152, 
196, 198, 220, 225-6, 227, 251, 
270-1, 273, 297-8, 306-7, 317, 
347-8 
Spencer, Herbert, xi, xiv, 78-9, 

153, 188, 189, 190, 364, 365 
Spencer's evolutionism, corres- 
pondence between mind and 
matter in, 368 
cosmogony in, 188 
imprint of relations and laws 

upon consciousness in, 188 
matter in, 365, 367 
mind in, 365, 367 
Spheres, concentric, in Aristotle's 

philosophy, 328 
Sphex, paralyzing instinct in, 

172-5 
Spiders and paralyzing hymenop- 

tera, 172 
Spinal cord, 110 

Spinoza, the adequate and the 
inadequate, 353 
cause, 277 
dogmatism, 356, 357 
eternity, 353 
extension, 350 
God, 351, 357 
intuitionism, 347 
mechanism, 348, 352, 355, 356 
time, 362 
Spirit, 251, 269, 270 
Spirituality and materiality, 128- 
9, 201-3, 316-7, 208-9, 210-1, 
212-3, 217, 218, 219, 222-3, 
237, 238, 245, 247-8, 249, 251, 



404 



INDEX 



254, 256, 257, 259, 261, 267, 
270-1, 272, 276, 343 

Spontaneity of life, 86, 237. See 
Freedom 
and mechanism, 40 
in vegetables, 109 
and the willed order, 224 

Sport (biol.), 63 

Starch, in the function of vege- 
table kingdom, 114 

States of becoming, 1, 13, 163, 
247-8, 299, 300, 307 

Static character or the intellect, 
155-6, 163, 274, 298 
views of becoming, 273 

Stehasny, 124 note 

Steam-engine and bronze, paral- 
lel as epoch-marking, 138-9 

Stentor and individuality, 260 

Stoics, 316 

Storing of solar energy by plants, 
246, 253-6 

Strain of bow and indivisibility 
of motion, 308 

Stream, duration as a, 39, 338 

Structure and function. See 

Function and structure 

identical, in divergent lines of 

evolution, 55, 60, 61-2, 63, 69, 

73-4, 75, 76-7, 83, 86, 87, 118-9 

Subject and attribute, 147-8 

Substance, albuminoid, 120-1 
continuity of living, 162 
organic, 121, 131, 140, 142, 149, 

162-3, 195-7 note, 255, 267 
in Spinoza's philosophy, 350 
ternary substances, 121 

Substantives, adjectives, verbs, 
correspond to the three clas- 
ses of representation, 302-4 

Substitution essential to repre- 
sentation of the Nought, 281, 
283-4, 289-90, 291, 294, 296 

Success of physics, 218, 219-20 
and superiority, 133, 264-5 

Succession in time, 10, 339, 340, 
341, 345. Cf. Juxtaposition 

Successors of Kant, 363, 364 

Sudden mutations, 28, 62-3, 64-5, 
68-9 

Sun, 115, 241, 323 

Superaddition of existence upon 
nothingness, 276 
of order upon disorder, 236, 
275 

Superimposition. See Measure- 
ment of qualities, in induc- 
tion, 216 

Superiority, evolutionary, 133-5. 
173, 174-5 



Superman, 267 
Supraconsciousness, 261 
Survival of the fit, 169. See Nat- 
ural selection 
Swim, learning to, as instinctive 

learning, 193, 194 
Symbol, the concept is a, 161, 

209, 341-2 
of reality, xi, 30-1, 71, 88-9, 93, 

195-6, 210, 240, 342, 360-1, 

369-70 
Symbolic knowledge of life, 199, 

342, 360 
Symbolism, 176, 180, 360 
Sympathetic or intuitive know- 
ledge, 209, 210. 342 
Sympathy, instinct is, 164, 168, 

172-8, 342-3. See Divination, 

Feeling, Inspiration 
Systematic metaphysics, dilemma 

of, 195, 196, 230-1 
contrasted with intuitional, 

191-2, 193-4, 238, 269, 270, 277, 

346-8 
postulate of, 190, 195 
Systematization of physics, Lieb- 

niz's philosophy, 347 
Systems, isolated, 9-13, 203, 214, 

215, 241, 242, 342, 347-9 

Tangent and curve, analogy with 
deduction and the moral 
sphere, 214 

analogy with physico-chemistry 
and life, 31 
Tarakevitch, 124 note 
Teleology. See Finalism 
Tendency, antagonistic tendencies 
of life, 13, 98, 103, 113, 135, 
150 

antagonistic tendencies in de- 
velopment of nervous system, 
124-5 

complementary tendencies of 
life, 51, 103, 135, 150, 168, 246 

to dissociation, 260 

divergent tendencies of life, 54, 
89, 99, 101, 107-8, 109-10, 112, 
116-8, 134, 135, 150, 181, 246, 
254-8 

to individuation, 13 

life a tendency to act on inert 
matter, 96 

toward mobility in animals, 109, 
110, 113, 127-8, 129-33, 135, 
181, 182 

the past exists in present ten- 
dency, 5 

to reproduce, 13 

of species to change, 85-86 



INDEX 



405 



Tendency ( Continued ) 
mathematical symbols of ten- 
dencies, 22, 23 
toward systems, in matter, 10 
transmission of, 80-1 
a vital property is a, 13 
Tension and extension, 236, 245 
and freedom, 200-2, 207-8, 223, 

237, 239, 300-2 
matter the inversion of vital, 

239 
of personality, 199-200, 201, 
207-8, 237, 239, 300 
Ternary substances, 121 
Theology consequent upon the 

philosophy of Ideas, 316 
Theoretic fallacies, 263, 264 
knowledge and instinct, 177, 

268 
knowledge and intellect, 155, 
177, 179, 238, 270, 342, 343 
Theorizing not the original func- 
tion of the intellect, 154-5 
Theory of knowledge, xiii, 178, 
180, 184-5, 197, 204, 207-8, 209, 
228-9, 231 
of life, xiii, 178, 180, 197 
Thermodynamics, 241-2. See 
Conservation of energy, Deg- 
radation of energy 
Thesis and antithesis, 205 
Thing as distinguished from mo- 
tion, 187, 202, 247-8, 249, 299- 
300 
as distinguished from relation, 
147, 148, 150, 152, 158-9, 159- 
60, 161, 187, 202, 352, 356-7 
and mind, 206 

as solidification operated by 
understanding, 249 
Thing-in-itself, 205, 206, 230-1, 

312 
Timaeus, 318 note 
Time and the absolute, 240r~2H, 
297-8, 339, 343-4 
abstract, 21, 22, 37, 39 
articulations of real, 331-3 
as force, 16, 45-6, 47, 51, 103, 

339 
homogeneous, 17, 18, 163-4, 

331-3 
as independent variable, 20, 

335-7 
interval of, 9, 22, 23 
as invention, 341-2 
in Leibniz's philosophy, 351, 

352, 362 
and logic, 4, 277 
and simultaneity, 9, 336, 337, 
341 



Time ( Continued ) 
in modern science 321-37, 

341-5 
and space in Kant, 205 
and space in ancient philoso- 
phy, 318, 319. See Duration 

Tools and intellect, 137-41, 150-1. 
See Implement 

Torpor, in evolution, 109, 111, 113, 
114 note, 120, 128-35, 181, 292 

Tortoise, Achilles and the, in 
Zeno, 311 

Touch, science expresses all per- 
ception as touch, 168 
is to vision as intelligence to 
instinct, 169 

Track laid by motion along its 
course, 309-12, 337 

Transcendental Aesthetic, 203 

Transformation, 32, 72, 73, 131, 
231, 263 

Transformism, 23-5 

Transition, form a snapshot view 
of, 301-2, 316-7, 318, 321, 344-5 

Transmissibility of acquired char- 
acters, 75-84, 87, 168, 169, 172- 
3, 225-6, 230-1 

Transmission of the vital impe- 
tus, 26, 27, 79, 85, 87, 88, 93-4, 
110, 126-7, 128, 230, 231, 246, 
255, 256, 257, 259, 270 

Trigger-action of motor mechan- 
isms, 272 

Triton, Regeneration in, 75 

Tropism and psychical activity, 
35 note 

Truth seized in intuition, 318-20 

Unconscious effort, 170 

instinct, 142-3, 144, 145-6, 147, 
166 

knowledge, 145-8, 150-1 
Unconsciousness, two kinds of, 144 
Undefmable, reality, 13, 48 
Understanding, absoluteness of, 
153-4, 190-1, 197-8, 199, 200 

and action, ix, xi, 179 

genesis of the, ix-xv, 49, 189, 
207-8, 257-9, 359, 361-2 

and geometry, ix, xii 

and innateness of categories, 
147, 148-9 

and intuition, 46-7 

and life, ix-xv, 13, 32-3, 46-50, 
88-9, 101, 147-8, 149, 152, 162- 
5, 173-4, 176-7, 178, 195-201, 
213, 220, 222-3, 224, 226, 257-9, 
261, 266, 270, 271, 313, 361-2, 
365 

and inert matter, 166, 168, 179, 



406 



INDEX 



Understanding (Continued) 

194-5, 198, 205-6, 207, 219, 355 

and the ready-made, xiii, 48,' 
237, 250, 251, 273, 311, 321, 
328-9, 354, 358 

and the solid, ix 

unlimited scope of the, 149, 150, 
152 

See Intellect, Intelligence, 
Concept, Categories, Frames 
of the understanding, Logic 
Undone, automatic and determi- 
nate evolution is action be- 
ing, 249 
Unfolding cause, 73, 74 
Unforeseeableness of action, 47 

of duration, 6, 164, 340-2 

of evolution, 47, 48, 52, 86, 224 

of invention. 164 

of life, 164, 184 

and the willed order, 224, 342-3 

See Foreseeing 
Unification as the function of the 

intellect, 152, 154, 357-8 
Uniqueness of phases of duration, 

164 
Unity of extension, 154 

of knowledge, 195-6 

of life, 106-7, 250, 268, 271 

of mental life, 268 

and multiplicity as determina- 
tions of space, 351-3 

of nature, 104-5, 189-90, 191, 
195-6, 197, 199, 322, 352, 356-8 

of the organism, 176-7 

of science, 195-6, 197, 228-9, 
230, 321, 322, 344-5, 347, 359- 
60, 362-3 
Universal interaction, 188, 189 

life, consciousness coextensive 
with, 186, 257, 270 
Universe, continuity of, 346 

Descartes's, 346 

physical, and the idea of dis- 
order, 233, 275 

duration of, 10, 11, 241 

evolution of, 241, 246 note 

growth of, 342-3, 344 

movement of, in Aristotle, 328 

mutability of, 244, 245 

as organism, 31, 241 

as realization of plan, 40 

rhythm of, 337, 339, 346-7 

states of, considered by science, 
336, 337 

as unification of physics, 348-9, 
357 
Unknowable, the, of evolutionism, 
xi 

the, in Kant, 204, 205, 206 



Unmaking, the nature of the pro- 
cess of materiality, 245, 248, 

249, 251, 272, 342-3 
Unorganized bodies, 7-8, 14, 20, 

21, 186. See inert matter 
instruments, 137-9, 140-1, 150-1 
matter, cleft between, and the 
organized, 190, 191, 196, 197-9 
matter, imitation of the or- 
ganized by, 33-4, 35, 36 
matter and science, 194-6 
matter. See inert matter 
Unwinding cause, 73 

of immutability in Greek phi- 
losophy, 325, 352 
Upspringing of invention, 164 
Utility, 4-5, 150, 152, 154-5, 158-9, 
160, 168, 187, 195-6, 247-8, 297- 

8, 328-9, 330 

Vanessa levana and Vanessa 

prorsa, transformation of, 72 

Variable, time as an independent, 

20, 336 
"Variation, accidental, 55, 63-4, 
68, 85, 168-9 
of color, in lizards, 72, 74 
by deviation, 82-3, 84 
of evolutionary type, 23-4, 72 
note, 131-2, 137-8, 167, 169, 
171-2, 264 
insensible, 63, 68 
interest as cause of, 131-2 
in plants, 85-86 
Vegetable kingdom. See Plants 
Verb, relation expressed by, 148 
Verbs, substantives and adjec- 
tives, 303 
Verse and prose, in illustration 
of the two kinds of order, 221, 
232 
Vertebrate, ix, 126, 130, 131-4, 141 
Vibrations, matter analyzed into 

elementary, 201 
Vicious circle, apparent, of in- 
tuitionism, 192-4, 196-7 
of intellectualism, 194, 197, 318- 

9, 320 

View, intellectual, of becoming, 
4, 90-1, 273, 298-9, 304, 305, 
310, 326-7 
intellectual, of matter, 203, 240, 

250, 254, 255 
of reality, 206 

Vignon, P., 35 note 
Virtual actions, 12. See Possible 
action 
geometry, 212 
Vise, consciousness compressed 



INDEX 



407 



in a, 179 
Vision of God, in Alexandrian 
philosophy, 322 
in molluscs. See Eye of mol- 
luscs, etc. 
in Salamandra maculata, 75 
Vital activity, 134-6, 139, 140, 166- 
9, 246, 247-8 
current, 26, 27, 53-5, 80, 85, 87, 
• 88, 96-105, 118-9, 120, 230-1, 

232, 239, 257, 266, 270 
impetus, 50-1, 53-5, 85, 87, 88, 
98-105, 118-9, 126-7, 128, 131- 
2, 141-2, 148-9, 150, 218, 230-1, 
232, 247-8, 250, 252, 254-5, 261 
order, cause in, 34, 35, 94-5, 164 
order, finality and, 223-5, 226 
order, generalization in the, 
and in the mathematical or- 
der contrasted, 225, 226, 230-1 
order, and the geometrical 
order, 222-3, 225, 226, 230, 231, 
235, 236, 330-1 
order, imitation of physical 

order by vital, 230 
principle, 42, 43, 225, 226 
order, repetition in the vital 
and the mathematical orders 
contrasted, 225, 226, 230, 231 
process, 166-7 
Vitalism, 42, 43 

Void, representation of, 273, 274, 
275, 277-8, 281, 283-4, 289-90, 
291, 292, 294, 296, 298 
Voisin, 80 

Volition and cerebral mechan- 
ism, 253-4 
Voluntary activity, 110, 252 
Vries (de), 24, 63 note, 85 
Wasps, instinct in, 140, 172 



Weapons and intellect, 137 
Weismann, 26, 78, 80-1 
Will and caprice, 47 
and cerebral mechanism, 252 
current of, penetrating matter, 

237 
insertion of, into reality, 305- 

6, 307 
and relaxation, 201, 207-8 
and mechanism in disorder, 233 
tension of, 199, 201, 207-8 
Willed order, mutual contingency 
Of willed order and mathe- 
matical order, 231-3 
unforeseeability in the, "224, 
342-3 
Willing, coincidence of seeing 

and, in intuition, 237 
Wilson, E. B„ 36 
Wolff, 75 note 
Words and states, 4, 302-3 
three classes of, corresponding 
to three clases of representa- 
tion, 302-3, 313-4 
World, intelligible, 162-3 

principle: conciousness, 237, 261 
Worms, in illustration of am- 
biguity of primitive organ- 
isms, 130 

Yellow-winged sphex, paralyzing 
instinct in, 172 

Zeno on motion, 308-13 

Zone of potentialities surround- 
ing acts, 179-80, 181, 264 

Zoology, 128-9 

Zoospores of algae, in illustra- 
tion of mobility in plants, 112 



\ 



1 



